




Boo k . K £ s?, 7 

Gop>TightIs? ^ I Oy 


COPYRIGHT DEPO! 


sn? 











31 


* 





# • 



l. 




* 



\ 









/ 




?• 



« 





























‘ 

) 

•% 


































•• 



















**v 































































Kfenio 


































* 





























Vv * v x 






N. 




















INTERNATIONAL POCKET LIBRARY 
Edited by Edmund R. Brown 

??r 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 


THE MAN WHO 
WOULD BE KING 


WITHOUT BENEFIT 
OF CLERGY 

BY 

RUDYARD KIPLING 

»» 

INTRODUCTION BY WILSON FOLLETT 



BOSTON 

THE FOUR SEAS COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS 



Copyright, 1919, by 
The Four Seas Company 



wu v 


1 7 1919 


The Four Seas Press 
Boston, Mass., U. S. A. 


©Cl. A 5 3 5 8 5 0 


INTRODUCTION 

I 

There are two contradictory views of Mr. Rudyard 
Kipling, both of them made familiar by much repeti- 
tion, and both vital enough so that in twenty years 
neither has given any special promise of eventually 
supplanting the other. 

The first view is that Mr. Kipling is an accomplished 
and industrious journalist turned man of letters, 
gathering and reporting novelties with all the journal- 
ist's facility; subject to most of the journalistic limita- 
tions, and subject also, finally and above all, to the 
limitations of an old-fashioned imperialistic and rather 
brutal philosophy which, for the twentieth century and 
men growing toward a humane and idealistic inter- 
nationalism, is simply not good enough. The other 
view is that Mr. Kipling is all objective artist, ob- 
sessed by no other concern than the artist’s own au- 
thentic concern for beauty — the beauty of the succes- 
sive forms and images into which he translates for us 
so much of life as he has seen, heard, imagined, felt. 
The one interpretation makes Kipling a sort of propa- 
gandist — first, of “the white man’s burden”, of imperial 
rule in general as against that principle which we have 
lately learned to call “the self-determination of peo- 
ples”; secondly and specifically, of British imperialism 
against all other. The second interpretation insists 
that, however much he may have written about British 
imperialism, it is no real part of his function to write 
for it; that, if the artist be sensitive enough to life, 
it makes no conceivable difference what special aspects 
7 


8 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


of life happen to have come under his notice ; that, in 
fine, all of Mr. Kipling’s poems and tales of Anglo- 
Indian life present, not arguments, but aspects — as- 
pects chosen from a body of fact which, being at once 
real, picturesque, and momentous, will serve as well as 
another. 

Mr. John Palmer has interestingly expressed* this 
second possible view of Kipling, in connection with an 
attempt to prove that Kipling’s grim levity, his brutal- 
ity, his cynicism, his sometimes irritating flippancy, his 
secheresse du cocur, are all deliberately invoked for 
aesthetic ends — as guards against sentimentality, and 
as guides to that truth whose very ruthlessness is 
beauty. The qualities of hardness which have some- 
times been traced to the imperialistic strain in Kipling 
the man, Mr. Palmer traces to the sensitiveness of Kip- 
ling the artist, the instant responsiveness of his tem- 
perament tp the demands of his subjects to be handled 
in a particular way. 

It is nothing to the present purpose to deny that 
there is a deal of truth in the first of these two esti- 
mates ; but it may very well be questioned whether it 
puts the accent in the right place. Both accounts are 
true, or something more than half-true; but they are 
accounts of quite different phenomena. The first has 
to do with Mr. Kipling as a person and as a political 
thinker, and with the inferences about him which one 
might draw from the whole trend and sum of his 
work considered as personal revelation. The second is 
an account simply of the single-minded devotion with 


*In “Rudyard Kipling” (Writers of the Day). New York: 
Henry Holt and Company. This volume also contains a useful 
bibliography of the writings of Mr. Kipling. 


INTRODUCTION 


9 


which, in this story and that taken by itself, an artist's 
imagination clothes in comeliness the abiding impres- 
sion of an old memory or a new dream. If we were 
dealing in biography, these two would have a connec- 
tion: we should read the man as self-betrayed in his 
work, the work as self-implied in the man. But when 
we are dealing in literature, in beautiful letters, and 
reading the works themselves for themselves, the two 
have no more intelligible connection than the worth of a 
jewel has with the casket which contains it. The at- 
tempt of the schools to make literature a clue to the 
man who wrote it, to the age in which it was produced, 
to various codes and notions of what ought to be done 
or not done, — to anything and everything other than 
the supreme power of the beautiful thing itself to make 
the moment eternal or “tease us out cf thought," — 
this attempt is the mortal enemy of literature, and al- 
most the destruction of our sense of what literature is 
for. But we common readers know in our hearts 
that no man ever yet wrote, or could write, a supreme 
story in order to exalt the opinions and prejudices 
either of himself or of an age; and it is precisely by 
virtue of their freedom from these opinions and preju- 
dices that the products of taste become of worth, and 
can survive the moment. In the instant of divination 
when we thrill to some luminous story for what it is 
in itself, forgetful quite of all J he doubts and conjec- 
tures not raised by the story, then we understand what 
is the purport and the justification of letters. And if 
it be a tale from Under the Deodars or Life’s Handicap 
or Traffics and Discoveries , we understand too that our 
debt is to that Kipling (by queer incidental mischance 
an imperialist and Anglophile fanatic) who has lived 


IO THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


in order to write stories — and not the least in the world 
to that other Kipling, the professional patriot and ex- 
horter to material prestige, whom some allege merely 
to have dramatized his personal convictions in a hand- 
ful of tales. 

The story is, after all, the thing: for all the purposes 
of literature, it makes no difference when or why it 
was written, or who wrote it. or what else he may also 
have written When we read the best talcs of Kipling, 
wc are experiencing parts which are genuinely greater 
and completer than the whole ; for those parts reach a 
consistency, a symmetry, an inherent logic of beauty, 
quite lacking to the whole personality and career which 
produced them. In Kipling, taken as a whole, there is 
no such intellectual and spiritual continuity as we find 
in, for example, Mr. Joseph Conrad ; no such disinter- 
estedness of contemplation, no such inexorable growth, 
no such cosmic sense of truth. But in The Drums of 
the Fore-and-Aft, Wireless, “They,” The Ship That 
Found Herself, The Man Who Was, The Man Who 
Would Be King, Brugglesmith, Steam Tactics, The 
Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney — in such stories as 
these (not to prolong the list) you find little record of 
the ugly limitations which belong to Kipling the citi- 
zen, Kipling the representative of a certain cult of 
blood and iron and efficiency, Kipling the junker. You 
find only a series of consummate embodiments of some 
kinds of beauty — the grim, the fantastic, the droll, the 
heroic, the pathetic. There is just enough artist in 
Kipling to fill one small shapely vessel at a time, and 
fill it full. Why, with these glorious tales in our 
hands, should we not cherish them for what they are, 
and leave the ignoble rest to homilists and pundits ? 


INTRODUCTION 


ii 


II 

The adaptability and virtuosity of the artist in Kip- 
ling could be illustrated within the scope of the present 
volume — a volume which seems to me precious out of 
all proportion to its size — in either of two ways. 

The first way would be to select two tales of differ- 
ent periods as well as of different modes. Between, 
for example, Without Benefit of Clergy and An Habi- 
tation Enforced (in Actions and Reactions) the bet- 
ter sort of reader would trace a paradoxical kinship, a 
similarity in difference. Without Benefit is the tragic 
idyll of a love predestined to material failure and dis- 
solution, a love snatched by puny human creatures in 
defiance of the strong will of the gods. Because Hol- 
den dares love Ameera across the barrier of race, the 
whole episode from beginning to end, for the lovers 
and for us, is saturated with the obscure sense of mor- 
tality. This sense, of mortality is the ultimate perfec- 
tion of the tragic in art. That the beauty which, in our 
forlorn lives, is most fragile and evanescent should be- 
come the very stuff of the eternal loveliness in art — 
that is the paradox of all greatest art, as fulfillment 
through abnegation is of all religions. Life gives the 
artist a series of broken arcs : he makes them into the 
perfect round, as he alone can do. Art can exist for 
life’s sake only because life has first existed, all trag- 
ically incomplete as it is, for art’s sake. Without 
Benefit of Clergy is the coherence and completion of 
art wrought out of the illogicality and dissolution of 
life. An Habitation Enforced is in some sort the con- 
verse of the earlier tale: it reverses the current of 
irony, it is a story of racial kinship deeply implanted, 


12 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


subtly at work against sundering circumstance, to bring 
back '‘after certain days,” across an ocean and a gulf 
of generations, two children of the New World who 
have heard in their blood the call of the Old. Its 
theme — the theme, roughly, of The Passionate Pilgrim 
of Henry James — exists in the region of pure high 
comedy, whose function it is to present life in those 
rare fulfillments which occur when life’s constant 
threat of disintegration is miraculously not carried out. 
Without Benefit of Clergy ends in the obliteration of 
the very scene: a surge of new life, of civilization, of 
progress, washes over the spot, “ ‘so that no man may 
say where this house stood.’ ” An Habitation En- 
forced ends in the renewing of an old structure for the 
sake of the time to come, in answer to the inexorable 
claims of generations yet unborn : “ ‘Make it oak then ; 
we can’t ^et out of it.’ ” 

The unity-in- duality of such a selection would have 
the further merit of calling attention to the artistic 
validity of Kipling in some of his later, lees popular 
manifestations. Criticism has been oddly cold to the 
volumes which follow the early Anglo-Indian period of 
Kipling ; and it is to be suspected that popular applause 
has for once belied its traditional independence of pro- 
fessional applause. It is doing a small service to the 
honorable trade of criticism, as well as, by happy 
chance, a great service to some receptive reader here 
and there, to suggest that the Kipling most notable for 
adequacy is he of two later volumes, Traffics and Dis- 
coveries and Actions and Reactions. 

There is, nevertheless, something to be said for the 
second and more conventional principle of selection 
here resorted to. The range of Kipling’s effects would 


INTRODUCTION 


i3 


lose force in the very process of being illustrated by 
the work of different decades ; for the mere lapse of 
time might account for that variety which, I wish here 
to show, has belonged to Kipling from the outset. In 
Without Benefit of Clergy and The Man Who Would 
Be King we have, then, his early period quintessential- 
ized ; and in the quite separate and contrasted identities 
of these two tales, both exotic, we have the measure of 
his variety — the more strikingly because it reveals the 
widest difference just where we might count on the 
narrowest resemblance. We replace the contrast be- 
tween tragic idyll and comic, from different periods, 
with that between tragic idyll and tragic farce from 
the same period. And of the two gaps the second 
seems, on the whole, the wider. 

The tale which is tragic farce. The Man Who Would 
Be King, stands with one exception unapproached in 
English among stories of the corrosion of human na- 
ture by the too intimate contact of exploiting race with 
exploited. That single exception, Mr. Joseph Con- 
rad’s Heart of Darkness, is so vastly more cosmic 
in its humor, and is planned on so vast and leisurely a 
scale, that it hardly allows itself to be compared with 
the earlier tale in fairness to both. The Man Who 
Would Be King may still be said, then, to remain in- 
comparable in its own kind. Its sort of perfection 
may indeed be trivial beside that of Heart of Dark- 
ness : but then, it ought to be added that The Man Who 
Would Be King renders trivial in turn Mr. Conrad’s 
own earlier treatment of the same theme in An Outpost 
of Progress — a fairer object of comparison, because 
of approximately the same dimensions as Kipling’s tale. 
After all, The Man Who Would Be King is perfect — 


14 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 

and what profit is to be got from the invidious com- 
parison of perfections? The mad Irishman Carnehan 
— a being so truly known and drawn that one hardly 
knows whether to call him more mad when he is mad 
than when he is sane — is all adequacy and utter truth 
from our first glimpse of him in the train at Nasirabad 
to the instant when his shriveled and ghastly head, still 
wearing the crown of gold, is jerked from the haircloth 
sack by the palsied hand of Dravot. This adequacy is 
the thing that finally matters. The tale is not some 
other tale by some other hand, — the fallacy of com- 
parison being the half-suggestion that it ought to be, — 
but it is perfectly, consummately, exhaustively itself, 
and as unlike anything else of its own author as it i-s 
unlike anything at all of any other author. 

If there remain a person to suggest that these stories, 
and the best of the others, must be second-rate and ephe- 
meral because the author of them has sometimes been 
a brazen-throated prophet of expediency, and some- 
times a patriot intolerant and insular, one can only 
suggest again to that person that he will never compre- 
hend an artist by looking at him through political spec- 
tacles. We have to do here, not with any code or pre- 
cept or programme, any formula or theory, any plea 
for or against imperialism or anything else; but only 
with two consummate narratives that will still exist 
and be beautiful, as now, in their strangely different 
ways, when all the local colorists have ceased from 
coloring, and the wicked realists are at rest. 

Wilson Follett 


THE MAN WIIU WOULD BE KING 


















THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


“Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found 
worthy.” 

The Law, as quoted, lays down a fair conduct of life, 
and one not easy to follow. I have been fellow to a 
beggar again and again under circumstances which 
prevented either of us finding out whether the other 
was worthy. I have still to be brother to a Prince, 
though I once came near to kinship with what might 
have been a veritable King and was promised the re- 
version of a Kingdom — army, law-courts, revenue and 
policy all complete. But, to-day, I greatly fear that 
my King is dead, and if I want a crown I must go and 
hunt for it myself. 

The beginning of everything was in a railway train 
upon the road to Mhow from Ajmir. There had been 
a Deficit in the Budget, which necessitated traveling, 
not Second-class, which is only half as dear as First- 
class, but by Intermediate, which is very awful indeed. 
There are no cushions in the Intermediate class, and the 
population are either Intermediate, which is Eurasian, 
or native, which for a long night journey is nasty, or 
Loafer, which is amusing though intoxicated. Inter- 
mediates do not patronize refreshment- rooms. They 
carry their food in bundles and pots, and buy sweets 
from the native sweetmeat-sellers, and drink the road- 
side water. That is why in the hot weather Inter- 
mediates are taken out of the carriages dead, and in all 
\veathers are most properly looked down upon. 

My particular Intermediate happened to be empty 
till I reached Nasirabad, when a huge gentleman in 
shirt-sleeves entered, and, following the custom of In- 
17 


i8 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


termediates, passed the time of day. He was a wan- 
derer and a vagabond like myself, but with an edu- 
cated taste for whiskey. He told tales of things he 
had seen and done, of out-of-the-way corners of the 
Empire into which he had penetrated, and of adven- 
tures in which he risked his life for a few days’ food. 
“If India was filled with men like you and me, not 
knowing more than the crows where they’d get their 
next day’s rations, it isn’t seventy millions of revenue 
the land would be paying — it’-s seven hundred millions,” 
said he ; and as I looked at his mouth and chin I was 
disposed to agree with him. We talked politics — the 
politics of Loaferdom that sees things from the under- 
side where the lath and plaster is not smoothed off — 
and we talked postal arrangements because my friend 
wanted to send a telegram back from the next station 
to Ajmir, which is the turning-off place from the Bom- 
bay to the Mhow line as you travel westward. My 
friend had no money beyond eight annas which he 
wanted for dinner, and I had no money at all, owing to 
the hitch in the Budget before mentioned. Further, I 
was going into a wilderness where, though I should 
resume touch with the Treasury, there were no tele- 
graph offices. I was, therefore, unable to help him in 
any way. 

“We might threaten a Station-master, and make him 
send a wire on tick,” said my friend, “but that’d mean 
inquiries for you and for me, and I’ve got my hands 
full these days. Did you say you are traveling back 
along this line within any days?” 

“Within ten,” I said. 

“Can’t you make it eight?” said he. “Mine is rather 
urgent business.” 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 19 


“I can send your telegram within ten days if that 
will serve you/’ I said. 

“I couldn’t trust the wire to fetch him now I think 
of it. It’s this way. He leaves Delhi on the 23d for 
Bombay. That means he’ll be running through Aj- 
mir about the night of the 23d.” 

“But I’m going into the Indian Desert,” I explained. 

“Well and good,” said he. “You’ll be changing at 
Marwar Junction to get into Jodhpore territory — you 
must do that — and he’ll be coming through Marwar 
Junction in the early morning of the 24th by the Bom- 
bay Mail. Can you be at Marwar Junction on that 
time? ’Twon’t be inconveniencing you because I 
know that there’s precious few pickings to be got out 
of these Central India States — even though you pre- 
tend to be correspondent of the Backwoodsman ” 

“Have you ever tried that trick?” I asked. 

“Again and again, but the Residents find you out, 
and then you get escorted to the Border before you’ve 
time to get your knife into them. But about my friend 
here. I must give him a word o’ mouth to tell him 
what’s come to me or else he won’t know where to go. 
I would take it more than kind of you if you was to 
come out of Central India in time to catch him at Mar- 
war Junction, and say to him: — 'He has gone South 
for the week.’ He’ll know what that means. He’s a 
big man with a red beard, and a great swell he is. 
You’ll find him sleeping like a gentleman with all his 
luggage round him in a Second-class compartment. 
But don’t you be afraid. Slip down the window, and 
say: — 'He has gone South for the week,’ and he’ll 
tumble. It’s only cutting your time of stay in those 


20 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


parts by two days. I ask you as a stranger — going to 
the West,” he said, with emphasis. 

“Where have you come from?” said I. 

“From the East,” said he, “and I am hoping that 
you will give him the message on the Square — for the 
sake of my Mother as well as your own.” 

Englishmen are not usually softened by appeals to 
the memory of their mothers, but for certain reasons, 
which will be fully apparent, I saw fit to agree. 

“It’s more than a little matter,” said he, “and that's 
why I ask you to do it — and now I know that I can 
depend on you doing it. A Second-class carriage at 
Marwar Junction, and a red-haired man asleep in it. 
You’ll be sure to remember. I get out at the next sta- 
tion, and I must hold on there till he comes or sends 
me what I want.” 

“I’ll give the message if I catch him,” I said, “and 
for the sake of your Mother as well as mine I’ll give 
you a word of advice. Don’t try to run the Central 
India States just now as the correspondent of the Back - 
woodsman. There’s a real one knocking about here, 
and it might lead to trouble.” 

“Thank you,” said he, simply, “and when will the 
swine be gone ? I can’t starve because he’s ruining my 
work. I wanted to get hold of the Degumber Rajah 
down here about his father’s widow, and give him a 
jump.” 

“What did he do to his father’s widow, then?” 

“Filled her up with red pepper and slippered her to 
death as she hung from a beam. I found that out my- 
self and I’m the only man that would dare going into 
the State to get hush-money for it. They’ll try to 
poison me, same as they did in Chortumna when I went 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 21 


on the loot there. But you’ll give the man at Marwar 
Junction my message?” 

He got out at a little roadside station, and I reflected. 
I had heard, more than once, of men personating cor- 
respondents of newspapers and bleeding small Native 
States with threats of exposure, but I had never met 
any of the caste before. They lead a hard life, and 
generally die with great suddenness. The Native 
States have a wholesome horror of English newspa- 
pers, which throw light on their peculiar methods of 
government, and do their best to choke correspondents 
with champagne, or drive them out of their mind with 
four-in-hand barouches. They do not understand that 
nobody cares a straw for the internal administration 
of Native States so long as oppression and crime are 
kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, 
drunk, or diseased from one end of the year to the 
other. Native States were created by Providence in 
order to supply picturesque scenery, tigers, and tall- 
writing. They are the dark places of the earth, full of 
unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and the 
Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of 
Harun-al-Raschid. When I left the train I did busi- 
ness with divers Kings, and in eight days passed 
through many changes of life. Sometimes I wore 
dress-clothes and consorted with Princes and Politi- 
cals, drinking from crystal and eating from silver. 
Sometimes I lay out upon the ground and devoured 
what I could get, from a plate made of a flapjack, and 
drank the running water, and slept under the same rug 
as my servant. It was all in the day’s work. 

Then I headed for the Great Indian Desert upon the 
proper date, as I had promised, and the night Mail set 


22 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 

me down at Marwar Junction, where a funny little, 
happy-go-lucky, native-managed railway runs to Jodh- 
pore. The Bombay Mail from Delhi makes a short 
halt at Marwar. She arrived as I got in, and I had 
just time to hurry to her platform and go down the 
carriages. There was only one Second-class on the 
train. I slipped the window and looked down upon a 
flaming red beard, half covered by a railway rug. That 
was my man, fast asleep, and I dug him gently in the 
ribs. He woke with a grunt and I saw his face in the 
light of the lamps. It was a great and shining face. 

“Tickets again?” said he. 

“No,” said I. “I am to tell you that he is gone 
South for the week. He is gone South for the week !” 

The train had begun to move out. The red man 
rubbed his eyes. “He has gone South for the week,” 
he repeated. “Now that’s just like his impidence. Did 
he say that I was to give you anything? — ’Cause I 
won’t.” 

“He didn’t,” I said, and dropped away, and watched 
the red lights die out in the dark. It was horribly cold 
because the wind was blowing off the sands. I 
climbed into my own train — not an Intermediate Car- 
riage this time — and went to sleep. 

If the man with the beard had given me a rupee I 
should have kept it as a memento of a rather curious 
affair. But the consciousness of having done my duty 
was my only reward. 

Later on I reflected that two gentlemen like my 
friends could not do any good if they foregathered and 
personated correspondents of newspapers, and might, if 
they “stuck up” one of the little rat-trap states of Cen- 
tral India or Southern Rajputana, get themselves into 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 23 

serious difficulties. I therefore took some trouble to 
describe them as accurately as I could remember to 
people who would be interested in deporting them : and 
succeeded, so I was later informed, in having them 
headed back from the Degumber borders. 

Then I became respectable, and returned to an Office 
where there were no Kings and no incidents except the 
daily manufacture of a newspaper. A newspaper of- 
fice seems to attract every conceivable sort of per- 
son, to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission 
ladies arrive, and beg that the Editor will instantly 
abandon all his duties to describe a Christian prize- 
giving in a back-slum of a perfectly inaccessible vil- 
lage; Colonels who have been overpassed for com- 
mands sit down and sketch the outline of a series of 
ten, twelve, or twenty- four leading articles on Senority 
versus Selection ; missionaries wish to know why they 
have not been permitted to escape from their regular 
vehicles of abuse and swear at a brother-missionary 
under special patronage of the editorial We ; stranded 
theatrical companies troop up to explain that they can- 
not pay for their advertisements, but on their return 
from New Zealand or Tahiti will do so with interest ; 
inventors of patent punkah-pulling machines, carriage 
couplings and unbreakable swords and axle-trees call 
with specifications in their pockets and hours at their 
disposal ; tea companies enter and elaborate their pros- 
pectuses with the office pens; secretaries of ball-com- 
mittees clamor to have the glories of their last dance 
more fully expounded ; strange ladies rustle in and 
say: — “I want a hundred lady’s card printed at once , 
please,” which is manifestly part of an Editor’s duty; 
and every dissolute ruffian that ever tramped the Grand 


24 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 

Trunk Road makes it his business to ask for employ- 
ment as a proof-reader. And, all the time, the tele- 
phone-bell is ringing madly, and Kings are being killed 
on the Continent, and Empires are saying — “You’re an- 
other,” and Mister Gladstone is calling down brim- 
stone upon the British Dominions, and the little black 
copy-boys are whining, “ kaa-pi chay-ha-yeh” (copy 
wanted) like tired bees, and most of the paper is as 
blank as Modred’s shield. 

But that is the amusing part of the year. There are 
other six months wherein none ever come to call, and 
the thermometer walks inch by inch up to the top of 
the glass, and the office is darkened to just above read- 
ing-light, and the press-machines are red-hot of touch, 
and nobody writes anything but accounts of amuse- 
ments in the Hill-stations or obituary notices. Then 
the telephone becomes a tinkling terror, because it tells 
you of the sudden deaths of men and women that you 
knew intimately, and the prickly-heat covers you as 
with a garment, and you sit down and write: — “A 
slight increase of sickness is reported from the Khuda 
Janta Khan District. The outbreak is purely sporadic 
in its nature, and, thanks to the energetic efforts of the 
District authorities, is now almost at an end. It is, 
however, with deep regret we record the death, etc.” 

Then the sickness really breaks out, and the less re- 
cording and reporting the better for the peace of the 
subscribers. But the Empires and the Kings continue 
to divert themselves as selfishly as before, and the 
Foreman thinks that a daily paper really ought to come 
out once in twenty-four hours, and all the people at 
the Hill-stations in the middle of their amusements 
say : — “Good gracious ! Why can’t the paper be 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 25 

sparkling? I’m sure there’s plenty going on up 
here.” 

That is the dark half of the moon, and, as the adver- 
tisements say, “must be experienced to be appreciated.” 

It was in that season, and a remarkably evil season, 
that the paper began running the last issue of the week 
on Saturday night, which is to say Sunday morning, 
after the custom of a London paper. This was a great 
convenience, for immediately after the paper was put 
to bed, the dawn would lower the thermometer from 
96° to almost 84° for half an hour, and in that chill — 
you have no idea how cold is 84° on the grass until you 
begin to pray for it — a very tired man could set off to 
sleep ere the heat roused him. 

One Saturday night it was my pleasant duty to put 
the paper to bed alone. A King or courtier or a 
courtesan or a community was going to die or get a 
new Constitution, or do something that was important 
on the other side of the world, and the paper was to be 
held open till the latest possible minute in order to 
catch the telegram. It was a pitchy black night, as 
stifling as a June night can be, and the loo, the red-hot 
wind from' the westward, was booming among the tin- 
der-dry trees and pretending that the rain was on its 
heels. Now and again a spot of almost boiling water 
would fall on the dust with the flop of a frog, but all 
our weary world knew that was only pretence. It was 
a shade cooler in the press-room than the office, so I 
sat there, while the type ticked and clicked, and the 
night-jars hooted at the windows, and the all but naked 
compositors wiped the sweat from theL foreheads and 
called for water. The thing that was keeping us back, 
whatever it was, would not come off, though the loo 


26 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


dropped and the last type was set, and the whole round 
earth stood still in the choking heat, with its finger on 
its lip, to wait the event. I drowsed, and wondered 
whether the telegraph was a blessing, and whether this 
dying man, or struggling people, was aware of the in- 
convenience the delay was causing. There was no 
special reason beyond the heat and worry to make 
tension, but, as the clock hands crept up to three 
o'clock and the machines spun their fly-wheels two 
and three times to see that all was in order, before I 
said the word that would set them off, I could have 
shrieked aloud. 

Then the roar and rattle of the wheels shivered the 
quiet into little bits. I rose to go away, but two men in 
white clothes stood in front of me. The first one 
said: — “It's him!” The second said: — “So it is!” 
And they both laughed almost as loudly as the machin- 
ery roared, and mopped their foreheads. “We see 
there was a light burning across the road and we were 
sleeping in that ditch there for coolness, and I said to 
my friend here, The office is open. Let’s come along 
and speak to him as turned us back from the Degumber 
State,” said the smaller of the two. He was the man 
I had met in the Mhow train, and his fellow was the 
red-bearded man of Marwar Junction. There was no 
mistaking the eyebrows of the one or the beard of the 
other. 

I was not pleased, because I wished to go to sleep, 
not to squabble with loafers. “What do you want ?” I 
asked. 

“Half an hour’s talk with you cool and comfortable, 
in the office,” said the red-bearded man. “We’d like 
some drink — the Contrack doesn’t begin yet, Peachey, 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 27 


so you needn’t look — but what we really want is ad- 
vice. We don’t want money. We ask you as a favor, 
because you did us a bad turn about Degumber.” 

I led from the press-room to the stifling office with 
the maps on the walls, and the red-haired man rubbed 
his hands. “That’s something like,” said he. “This 
was the proper shop to come to. Now, Sir, let me 
introduce to you Brother Peachey Carnehan, that’s 
him, and Brother Daniel Dravot, that is me, and the 
less said about our professions the better, for we have 
been most things in our time. Soldier, sailor, com- 
positor, photographer, proof-reader, street-preacher, 
and correspondents of the Backwoodsman when we 
thought the paper wanted one. Carnehan is sober, 
and so am I. Look at us first and see that’s sure. It 
will save you cutting into my talk. We’ll take one 
of your cigars apiece, and you shall see us light.” 

I watched the test. The men were absolutely sober, 
so I gave them each a tepid peg. 

“Well and good,” said Carnehan of the eyebrows, 
wiping the froth from his moustache. “Let me talk 
now, Dan. We have been all over India, mostly on 
foot. Wc have been boiler-fitters, engine-drivers, 
petty contractors, and all that, and we have decided 
that India isn’t big enough for such as us.” 

They certainly were too big for the office. Dravot’s 
beard seemed to fill half the room and Carnehan’s 
shoulders the other half, as they sat on the big table. 
Carnehan continued : — “The country isn’t half worked 
out because they that governs it won’t let you touch it. 
They spend all their blessed time in governing it, 
and you can’t lift a spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for 
oil, nor anything like that without all the Government 


28 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


saying — ‘Leave it alone and let us govern/ Therefore, 
such as it is, we will let it alone, and go away to some 
other place where a man isn’t crowded and can come 
to his own. We are not little men, and there is noth- 
ing that we are afraid of except Drink, and we have 
signed a Contrack on that. Therefore, we are going 
away to be Kings.” 

“Kings in our own right,” muttered Dravot. 

“Yes, of course,” I said. “You’ve been tramping 
in the sun, and it’s a very warm night, and hadn’t you 
better sleep over the notion? Come to-morrow.” 

“Neither drunk nor sunstruck,” said Dravot. “We 
have slept over the notion half a year, and require to 
see Books and Atlases, and we have decided that there 
is only one place now in the world that two strong men 
can Sar-a-w/mcL They call it Kafiristan. By my 
reckoning it’s the top right-hand corner of Afghani- 
stan, not more than three hundred miles from Pesha- 
wur. They have two and thirty heathen idols there, and 
we’ll be the thirty-third. It’s a mountaineous country, 
and the women of those parts are very beautiful.” 

“But that is provided against in the Contrack,” said 
Carnehan. “Neither Women nor Liqu-or, Daniel.” 

“And that’s all we know, except that no one has 
gone there, and they fight, and in any place where they 
fight a man who knows how to drill men can always 
be a King. We shall go to those parts and say to any 
King we find — ‘D’you want to vanquish your foes?’ 
and we will show him how to drill men; for that we 
know better than anything else. Then we will subvert 
that King and seize his Throne and establish a 
Dy-nasty.” 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 29 

“You’ll be cut to pieces before you’re fifty miles 
across the Border,” I said. “You have to travel 
through Afghanistan to get to that country. It’s one 
mass of mountains and peaks and glaciers, and no Eng- 
lishman has been through it. The people are utter 
brutes, and even if you reached them you couldn’t do 
anything.” 

“That’s more like,” said Carnehan. “If you could 
think us a little more mad we would be more pleased. 
We have come to you to know about this country, to 
read a book about it, and to be shown maps. We want 
you to tell us that we are fools and to show us your 
books.” He turned to the bookcases. 

“Are you at all in earnest ?” I said. 

“A little,” said Dravot, sweetly. “As big a map as 
you have got, even if it’s all blank where Kafiristan is, 
and any books you’ve got. We can read, though we 
aren’t very educated.” 

I uncased the big thirty-two-miles-to-the-inch map 
of India, and two smaller Frontier maps, hauled down 
volume INF-KAN of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, 
and the men consulted them. 

“See here !” said Dravot, his thumb on the map. “Up 
to Jagdallak, Peachey and me know the road. We was 
there with Roberts’s Army. We’ll have to turn off to 
the right at Jagdallak through Laghmann territory. 
Then we get among the hills — fourteen thousand feet 
— fifteen thousand — it will be cold work there, but it 
don’t look very far on the map.” 

I handed him Wood on the Sources of the Oxus. 
Carnehan was deep in the Encyclopedia. 

“They’re a mixed lot,” said Dravot, reflectively; 
“and it won’t help us to know the names of their tribes. 


3 o THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 

The more tribes the more they’ll fight, and the better 
for us. From Jagdallak to Ashang. H’mm!” 

“But all the information about the country is as 
sketchy and inaccurate as can be,” I protested. “No 
one knows anything about it really. Here’s the file of 
the United Serviced Institute. Read what Bellew 
says.” 

“Blow Bellew!” said Carnehan. “Dan, they’re an 
all-fired lot of heathens, but this book here says they 
think they’re related to us English.” 

I smoked while the men pored over Raverty, Wood , 
the maps and the Encyclopaedia. 

“There is no use your waiting,” said Dravot, politely. 
“It’s about four o’clock now. We’ll go before six 
o’clock if you want to sleep, and we won’t steal any of 
the papers. Don’t you sit up. We’re two harmless 
lunatics, and if you come, to-morrow evening, down 
to the Serai we’ll say good-bye to you.” 

“You are two fools,” I answered. “You’ll be turned 
back at the Frontier or cut up the minute you set foot 
in Afghanistan. Do you want any money or a recom- 
mendation down-country? I can help you to the 
chance of work next week.” 

“Next week we shall be hard at work ourselves, 
thank you,” said Dravot. “It isn’t so easy being a 
King as it looks. When we’ve got our Kingdom in 
going order we’ll let you know, and you can come up 
and help us to govern it.” 

“Would two lunatics make a Contrack like that?” 
said Carnehan, with subdued pride, showing me a 
greasy half-sheet of note-paper on which was written 
the following. I copied it, then and there, as a curi- 
osity : 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 31 

This Contract between me and you persuing wit - 
nesseth in the name of God — Amen and so forth. 

{One) That me and you will settle this matter to- 
gether: i. e., to be Kings of Kafiristan. 
(Two) That you and me will not, while this matter 
is being settled, look at any Liquor, nor 
any Woman, black, white or brown, so 
as to get mixed up with one or the other 
harmful. 

(Three) That we conduct ourselves with dignity and 
discretion, and if one of us gets into 
trouble the other will stay by him. 

Signed by you and me this day. 

Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan. 

Daniel Dravot. 

Both Gentlemen at Large. 

“There was no need for the last article/’ said Carne- 
han, blushing modestly; “but it looks regular. Now 
you know the sort of men that loafers are — we are 
loafers, Dan, until we get out of India — and do you 
think that we would sign a Contrack like that unless we 
was in earnest? We have kept away from the two 
things that make life worth having.” 

“You won’t enjoy your lives much longer if you are 
going to try this idiotic adventure. Don’t set the office 
on fire,” I said, “and go away before nine o’clock.” 

I left them still poring over the maps and making 
notes on the back of the “Contrack.” “Be sure to 
come down to the Serai to-morrow,” were their parting 
words. 

The Kumharsen Serai is the great four-square sink 


32 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 

of humanity where the strings of camels and horses 
from the North load and unload. All the nationalities 
of Central Asia may be found there, and most of the 
folk of India proper. Balkh and Bokhara there meet 
Bengal and Bombay, and try to draw eye-teeth. You 
can buy ponies, turquoises, Persian pussy-cats, saddle- 
bags, fat-tailed sheep and musk in the Kumharsen 
Serai, and get many strange things for nothing. In 
the afternoon I went down there to see whether my 
friends intended to keep their word or were lying about 
drunk. 

A priest attired in fragments of ribbons and rags 
stalked up to me, gravely twisting a child's paper 
whirligig. Behind him was his servant bending under 
the load of a crate of mud toys. The two were loading 
up two camels, and the inhabitants of the Serai 
watched them with shrieks of laughter. 

“The priest is mad,” said a horse-dealer to me. “He 
is going up to Kabul to sell toys to the Amir. He will 
either be raised to honor or have his head cut off. He 
came in here this morning and has been behaving mad- 
ly ever since.” 

“The witless are under the protection of God,” stam- 
mered a flat-cheeked Usbeg in broken Hindi. “They 
foretell future events.” 

“Would they could have foretold that my caravan 
would have been cut up by the Shinwaris almost within 
shadow of the Pass !” grunted the Eusufzai agent of a 
Rajputana trading-house whose goods had been felon- 
iously diverted into the hands of other robbers just 
across the Border, and whose misfortunes were the 
laughing-stock of the bazar. “Ohe, priest, whence 
come you and whither do you go ?” 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 33 

“From Roum have I come/’ shouted the priest, wav- 
ing his whirligig; “from Roum, blown by the breath of 
a hundred devils across the sea! O thieves, robbers, 
liars, the blessing of Pir Khan on pigs, dogs, and per- 
jurers ! Who will take the Protected of God to the 
North to sell charms that are never still to the Amir? 
The camels shall not gall, the sons shall not fall sick, 
and the wives shall remain faithful while they are 
away, of the men who give me place in their caravan. 
Who will assist me to slipper the King of the Roos 
with a golden slipper with a silver heel? The protec- 
tion of Pir Khan be upon his labors !” He spread out 
the skirts of his gaberdine and pirouetted between the 
lines of tethered horses. 

“There starts a caravan from Peshawur to Kabul in 
twenty days, Huzrut,” said the Eusufzai trader. “My 
camels go therewith. Do thou also go and bring us 
good-luck. ,, 

“I will go even now !” shouted the priest. “I will 
depart upon my winged camels, and be at Peshawur in 
a day ! Ho ! Hazar Mir Khan/’ he yelled to his ser- 
vant, “drive out the camels, but let me first mount my 
own.” 

He leaped on the back of his beast as it knelt, and, 
turning round to me, cried: — “Come thou also, Sahib, 
a little along the road, and I will sell thee a charm. — an 
amulet that shall make thee King of Kafiristan.” 

Then the light broke upon me, and I followed the 
two camels out of the Serai till we reached open road 
and the priest halted. 

“What d’ you think o' that?” said he in English. 
“Carnehan can’t talk their patter, so I’ve made him 
my servant. He makes a handsome servant. ’Tisn’t 


34 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


for nothing that Eve been knocking about the country 
for fourteen years. Didn’t I do that talk neat? 
We’ll hitch on to a caravan at Peshawur till we get to 
Jagdallak, and then we’ll see if we can get donkeys for 
our camels, and strike into Kafiristan. Whirligigs for 
the Amir, O Lor! Put your hand under the camel- 
bags and tell me what you feel.” 

I felt the butt of a Martini, and another and another. 

“Twenty of ’em,” said Dravot, placidly. “Twenty 
of ’em, and ammunition to correspond, under the 
whirligigs and the mud dolls.” 

“Heaven help you if you are caught with those 
things!” I said. “A Martini is worth her weight in 
silver among the Pathans.” 

“Fifteen hundred rupees of capital — every rupee we 
could beg, borrow, or steal — are invested on these two 
camels,” said Dravot. “We won’t get caught. We’re 
going through the Khaiber with a regular caravan. 
Who’d touch a poor mad priest?” 

“Have you got everything you want?” I asked, over- 
come with astonishment. 

“Not yet, but we shall soon. Give us a memento of 
your kindness, Brother. You did me a service yester- 
day, and that time in Marwar. Half my Kingdom 
shall you have, as the saying is.” I slipped a small 
charm compass from my watch-chain and handed it up 
to the priest. 

“Good-bye,” said Dravot, giving me hand cautious- 
ly. “It’s the last time we’ll shake hands with an Eng- 
lishman these many days. Shake hands with him, 
Carnehan,” he cried, as the second camel passed me. 

Carnehan leaned down and shook hands. Then the 
camels passed away along the dusty road, and I was 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 35 

left alone to wonder. My eye could detect no failure 
in the disguises. The scene in Serai attested that they 
were complete to the native mind. There was just the 
chance, therefore, that Carnehan and Dravot would be 
able to wander through Afghanistan without detection. 
But, beyond, they would find death, certain and awful 
death. 

Ten days later a native friend of mine, giving me 
the news of the day from Peshawur, wound up his 
letter with : — “There has been much laughter here on 
account of a certain mad priest who is going in his es- 
timation to sell petty gauds and insignificant trinkets 
which he ascribes as great charms to H. H. the Amir 
of Bokhara. He passed through Peshawur and as- 
sociated himself to the Second Summer caravan that 
goes to Kabul. The merchants are pleased because 
through superstition they imagine that such mad fel- 
lows bring good-fortune.” 

The two, then, were beyond the Border. I would 
have prayed for them, but, that night, a real King died 
in Europe, and demanded an obituary notice. 

********* 

The wheel of the world swings through the same 
phases again and again. Summer passed and winter 
thereafter, and came and passed again. The daily pa- 
per continued and I with it, and upon the third summer 
there fell a hot night, a night-issue, and a strained wait- 
ing for something to be telegraphed from the other side 
of the world, exactly as had happened before. A few 
great men had died in the past two years, the machines 
worked with more clatter, and some of the trees in the 
Office garden were a few feet taller. But that was all 
the difference. 


36 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 

I passed over to the press-room, and went through 
just such a scene as I have already described. The ner- 
vous tension was stronger than it had been two years be- 
fore, and I felt the heat more acutely. At three o’clock 
I cried, “Print off,” and turned to go, when there crept 
to my chair what was left of a man. He was bent into 
a circle, his head was sunk between his shoulders, and 
he moved his feet one over the other like a bear. I 
could hardly see whether he walked or crawled — this 
rag-wrapped, whining cripple who addressed me by 
name, crying that he was come back. “Can you give 
me a drink?” he whimpered. “For the Lord’s sake, 
give me a drink!” 

I went back to the office, the man following with 
groans of pain, and I turned up the lamp. 

“Don’t you know me?” he gasped, dropping into a 
chair, and he turned his drawn face, surmounted by a 
shock of grey hair, to the light. 

I looked at him intently. Once before had I seen 
eyebrows that met over the nose in an inch-broad black 
band, but for the life of me I could not tell where. 

“I don’t know you,” I said, handing him the whis- 
key. “What can I do for you?” 

He took a gulp of the spirit raw, and shivered in 
spite of the suffocating heat. 

“I’ve come back,” he repeated ; “and I was the King 
of Kafiristan — meandDravot — crowned Kings we was ! 
In this office we settled it — you setting there and giv- 
ing us the books. I am Peachey— Peachey Taliaferro 
Carnehan, and you’ve been setting here ever since — 
O Lord !” 

I was more than a little astonished, and expressed 
my feelings accordingly. 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 3 7 


“It’s true,” said Carnehan, with a dry cackle, nursing 
his feet, which were wrapped in rags. “True as gos- 
pel. Kings we were, with crowns upon our heads — me 
and Dravot — poor Dan — oh, poor, poor Dan, that 
would never take advice, not though I begged of him !” 

“Take the whiskey,” I said, “and take your own 
time. Tell me all you can recollect of everything from 
beginning to end. You got across the border on your 
camels, Dravot dressed as a mad priest and you his 
servant. Do you remember that?” 

“I ain’t mad — yet, but I shall be that way soon. Of 
course I remember. Keep looking at me, or maybe 
my words will go all to pieces. Keep looking at me 
in my eyes and don’t say anything.” 

I leaned forward and looked into his face as steadily 
as I could. He dropped one hand upon the table and 
I grasped it by the wrist. It was twisted like a bird’s 
claw, and upon the back was a ragged, red, diamond- 
shaped scar. 

“No, don’t look there. Look a t me,” said Carnehan. 

“That comes afterward, but for the Lord’s sake 
don’t distrack me. We left with that caravan, me and 
Dravot playing all sorts of antics to amuse the people 
we were with. Dravot used to make us laugh in the 
evenings when all the people were cooking their din- 
ners — cooking their dinners, and . . . what did they 

do then? They lit little fires with sparks that went 
into Dravot’s beard, and we all laughed — fit to die. 
Little red fires they was, going into Dravot’s big red 
beard — so funny.” Hie eves left mine and he smiled 

foolishly. , „ T 

“You went as far as Jagdallak with that caravan, I 
said, at a venture, “after you had lit those fires. To 


38 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 

Jagdallak, where you turned off to try to get into Ka- 
firistan.” 

“No, we didn’t neither. What are you talking 
about? We turned off before Jagdallak, because we 
heard the roads was good. But they wasn’t good en- 
ough for our two camels — mine and Dravot’s. When 
we left the caravan, Dravot took off all his clothes and 
mine too, and said we would be heathen, because the 
Kafirs didn’t allow Mohammedans to talk to them. So 
we dressed betwixt and between, and such a sight as 
Daniel Dravot I never saw yet nor expect to see again. 
He burned half his beard, and slung a sheep-skin over 
his shoulder, and shaved his head into patterns. He 
shaved mine, too, and made me wear outrageous things 
to look like a heathen. That was in a most mountain- 
eous country, and our camels couldn’t go along any 
more because of the mountains. They were tall and 
black, and coming home I saw them fight like wild 
goats — there are lots of goats in Kafiristan. And these 
mountains, they never keep still, no more than the 
goats. Always fighting they are, and don’t let you sleep 
at night.” 

“Take some more whiskey,” I said, very slowly. 
“What did you and Daniel Dravot do when the camels 
could go no further because of the rough roads that led 
into Kafiristan?” 

“What did which do? There was a party called 
Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan that was with Dravot. 
Shall I tell you about him? He died out there in the 
cold. Slap from the bridge feh Peachey, turning 
and twisting in the a penny whirligig that you 

can acll to the Amir— No ; they was two for three ha’- 
pence, those whirligigs, or I am much mistaken and 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 39 

woful sore. And then these camels were no use, and 
Peachey said to Dravot — ‘For the Lord’s sake, let’s get 
out of this before our heads are chopped off,’ and with 
that they killed the camels all among the mountains, 
not having anything in particular to eat, but first they 
took off the boxes with thp guns and the ammunition, 
till two men came along driving four mules. Dravot 
up and dances in front of them, singing — ‘Sell me four 
mules.’ Says the first man, — ‘If you are rich enough 
to buy, you are rich enough to rob ;’ but before ever he 
could put his hand to his knife, Dravot breaks his neck 
over his knee, and the other party runs away. So 
Carnehan loaded the mules with the rifles that was 
taken off the camels, and together we starts forward 
into those bitter cold mountaineous parts, and never a 
road broader than the back of your hand.” 

He paused for a moment, while I asked him if he 
could remember the nature of the country through 
which he had journeyed. 

“I am telling you as straight as I can, but my head 
isn’t as good as it might be. They drove nails through 
it to make me hear better how Dravot died. The coun- 
try was mountaineous and the mules were most con- 
trary, and the inhabitants was dispersed and solitary. 
They went up and up, and down and down, and that 
other party, Carnehan, was imploring of Dravot not 
to sing and whistle so loud, for fear of bringing down 
the tremenjus avalanches. But Dravot says that if a 
King couldn’t sing it wasn’t worth being King, and 
whacked the mules over the rump, and never took no 
heed for ten cold days. We came to a big level valley all 
among the mountains, and the mules were near dead, 
so we killed them, not having anything in special for 


4 o The man who would be king 

them or us to eat. We sat upon the boxes, and played 
odd and even with the cartridges that was jolted out. 

“Then ten men with bows and arrows ran down that 
valley, chasing twenty men with bows and arrows, and 
the row was tremenjus. They was fair men — fairer 
than you or me -with yellow hair and remarkable well 
built. Says Dravot, unpacking the guns — ‘This is the 
beginning of the business. We’ll fight for the ten 
men/ and with that he fires two rifles at the twenty 
men, and drops one of them at two hundred yards from 
the rock where he was sitting. The other men began 
to run, but Carnehan and Dravot sits on the boxes pick- 
ing them off at all ranges, up and down the valley. 
Then we goes up to the ten men that had run across the 
snow too, and they fires a footy little arrow at us. 
Dravot he shoots above their heads and they all falls 
down flat. Then he walks over them, and kicks them, 
and then he lifts them up and shakes hands all round 
to make them friendly like. He calls them and gives 
them the boxes to carry, and waves his hand for all the 
world as though he was King already. They takes the 
boxes and him across the valley and up the hill into a 
pine wood on the top, where there was half a dozen big 
stone idols. Dravot he goes to the biggest — a fellow 
they call Imbra — and lays a rifle and a cartridge at his 
feet, rubbing his nose respectful with his own nose, pat- 
ting him on the head, and saluting in front of it. He 
turns round to the men and nods his head, and says, — 
‘That’s all right. I’m in the know too, and all these old 
jim-jams are my friends.’ Then he opens his mouth 
and points down it, and when the first man brings him 
food, he says — ‘No’ ; and when the second man brings 
him food, he says — ‘No’; but when one of the old 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 41 

priests and the boss of the village brings him food, he 
says — ‘Yes ;’ very haughty, and eats it slow. That was 
how we came to our first village, without any trouble, 
just as though we had tumbled from the skies. But 
we tumbled from one of those damned rope-bridges, 
you see, and you couldn’t expect a man to laugh much 
after that.” 

“Take some more whiskey and go on,” I said. “That 
was the first village you came into. How did you get 
to be King?” 

“I wasn’t King,” said Carnehan. “Dravot he was 
the King, and a handsome man he looked with the gold 
crown on his head and all. Him and the other party 
stayed in that village, and every morning Dravot sat by 
the side of old Imbra, and the people came and wor- 
shipped. That was Dravot’s order. Then a lot of 
men came into the valley, and Carnehan and Dravot 
picks them off with the rifles before they knew where 
they was, and runs down into the valley and up again 
the other side, and finds another village, same as the 
first one, and the people all falls down flat on their 
faces, and Dravot says — ‘Now what is the trouble be- 
tween you two villages?’ and the people points to a 
woman, as fair as you or me, that was carried off, and 
Dravot takes her back to the first village and counts up 
the dead — eight there was. For each dead man Dra- 
vot pours a little milk on the ground and waves his 
arms like a whirligig and ‘That’s all right/ says he. 
Then he and Carnehan takes the big boss of each vil- 
lage by the arm and walks them down into the valley, 
and shows them how to scratch a line with a spear 
right down the valley, and gives each a sod of turf 
from both sides o’ the line. Then all the people comes 


42 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


down and shouts like the devil and all, and Dravot 
says, — ‘Go and dig the land, and be fruitful and mul- 
tiply/ which they did, though they didn’t understand. 
Then we asks the names of things in their lingo — 
bread and water and fire and idols and such, and Dra- 
vot leads the priest of each village up to the idol, and 
says he must sit there and judge the people, and if any- 
thing goes wrong he is to be shot. 

“Next week they was all turning up the land in the 
valley as quiet as bees and much prettier, and the 
priests heard all the complaints and told Dravot in 
dumb show what it was about. ‘That’s just the be- 
ginning/ says Dravot. ‘They think we’re Gods.’ He 
and Carnehan picks out twenty good men and shows 
them how to click off a rifle, and form fours, and ad- 
vance in line, and they was very pleased to do so, and 
clever to see the hang of it. Then he takes out his 
pipe and his baccy-pouch and leaves one at one village 
and one at the other, and off we two goes to see what 
was to be done in the next valley. That was all rock, 
and there was a little village there, and Carnehan says, 
— ‘Send ’em to the old valley to plant,’ and takes ’em 
there and gives ’em some land that wasn’t took before. 
They were a poor lot, and we blooded ’em with a kid 
before letting ’em into the new Kingdom. That was 
to impress the people, and then they settled down quiet, 
and Carnehan went back to Dravot who had got into 
another valley, all snow and ice and most mountaineous. 
There was no people there and the Army got afraid, so 
Dravot shoots one of them, and goes on till he finds 
some people in a village, and the Army explains that 
unless the people wants to be killed they had better not 
shoot their little matchlocks ; for they had matchlocks. 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 43 

We makes friends with the priest and I stays there 
alone with two of the Army, teaching the men how to 
drill, and a thundering big Chief comes across the 
snow with kettle-drums and horns twanging, because 
he heard there was a new God kicking about. Carne- 
han sights for the brown of the men half a mile across 
the snow and wings one of them. Then he sends a 
message to the Chief that, unless he wished to be killed, 
he must come and shake hands with me and leave his 
arms behind. The chief comes alone first, and Carne- 
han shakes hands with him and whirls his arms about, 
same as Dravot used, and very much surprised that 
Chief was, and strokes my eyebrows. Then Carne- 
han goes alone to the Chief, and asks him in dumb 
show if he had an enemy he hated. T have/ says the 
Chief. So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, 
and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at 
the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as 
well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a 
great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the 
Chief's men rushes into a village and takes it ; we three 
Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy. So we 
took that village too, and I gives the Chief a rag from 
my coat and says, 'Occupy till I come': which was 
scriptural. By way of a reminder, when me and the 
Army was eighteen hundred yards away, I drops a bul- 
let near him standing on the snow, and all the people 
fall? hat on their faces. Then I sends a letter to Dra- 
vot, wherever he be by land or by sea." 

At the risk of throwing the creature out of train I 
interrupted, — "How could you write a letter up yon- 
der?" 

"The letter? — Oh! — The letter! Keep looking at 


44 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


me between the eyes, please. It was a string-talk let- 
ter, that we’d learned the way of it from a blind beggar 
in the Punjab.” 

I remember that there had once come to the office a 
blind man with a knotted twig and a piece of string 
which he wound round the twig according to some cy- 
pher of his own. He could, after the lapse of days or 
hours, repeat the sentence which he had reeled up. He 
had reduced the alphabet to eleven primitive sounds ; 
and tried to teach me his method, but failed. 

“I sent that letter to Dravot,” said Carnehan; “and 
told him to come back because this Kingdom was grow- 
ing too big for me to handle, and then I struck for the 
first valley, to see how the priests were working. They 
called the village we took along with the Chief, Bash- 
kai, and the first village we took, Er-Heb. The priests 
at Er-Heb was doing all right, but they had a lot of 
pending cases about land to show me, and some men 
from another village had been firing arrows at night. 
I went out and looked for that village and fired four 
rounds at it from a thousand yards. That used all the 
cartridges I cared to spend, and I waited for Dravot, 
who had been away two or three months, and I kept 
my people quiet. 

“One morning I heard the devil’s own noise of drums 
and horns, and Dan Dravot marches down the hill with 
his Army and a tail of hundreds of men, and, which 
was the most amazing — a great gold crown on his head. 
‘My Gord, Carnehan/ says Daniel, ‘this is a tremenjus 
business, and we’ve got the whole country as far as it’s 
worth having. I am the son of Alexander by Queen 
Semiramis, and you’re my younger brother and a God 
too ! It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever seen. I’ve been 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 45 

marching and fighting for six weeks with the Army, 
and every footy little village for fifty miles has come 
in rejoiceful; and more than that, Eve got the key of 
the whole show, as you’ll see, and I’ve got a crown for 
you ! I told ’em to make two of ’em at a place called 
Shu, where the gold lies in the rock like suet in mut- 
ton. Gold I’ve seen, and turquoise I’ve kicked out of 
the cliffs, and there’s garnets in the sands of the river, 
and here’s a chunk of amber that a man brought me. 
Call up all the priests and, here, take your crown.’ 

“One of the men opens a black hair bag and I slips 
the crown on. It was too small and too heavy, but I 
wore it for the glory. Hammered gold it was — five 
pound weight, like a hoop of a barrel. 

“ ‘Peachey,’ says Dravot, ‘we don’t want to fight no 
more. The Craft’s the trick so help me !’ and he brings 
forward that same Chief that I left at Bashkai — Billy 
Fish we called him afterward, because he was so like 
Billy Fish that drove the big tank-engine at Mach on 
the Bolan in the old days. ‘Shake hands with him,’ 
says Dravot, and I shook hands and nearly dropped, 
for Billy Fish gave me the Grip. I said nothing, but 
tried him with the Fellow Craft Grip. He answers, 
all right, and I tried the Master’s Grip, but that was a 
slip. ‘A Fellow Craft he is !’ I says to Dan. ‘Does 
he know the word?’ ‘He does,’ says Dan, ‘and all the 
priests know. It’s a miracle ! The Chiefs and the 
priests can work a Fellow Craft Lodge in a way that’s 
very like ours, and they’ve cut the marks on the rocks, 
but they don’t know the Third Degree, and they’ve 
come to find out. It’s Gord’s Truth. I’ve known these 
long years that the Afghans knew up to the Fellow 
Craft Degree, but this is a miracle. A God and a 


4 6 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 

Grand-Master of the Craft am I, and a Lodge in the 
Third Degree I will open, and we’ll raise the head 
priests and the Chiefs of the villages.’ 

“ Tt’s against all the law,’ I says, ‘holding a Lodge 
without warrant from any one; and we never held 
office in any Lodge.’ 

‘“It’s a master-stroke of policy,’ says Dravot. ‘It 
means running a country as easy as a four-wheeled 
bogy on a down grade. We can’t stop to inquire now, 
or they’ll turn against us. I’ve forty Chiefs at my heel, 
and passed and raised according to their merits they 
shall be. Billet these men on the villages and see that 
we run up a Lodge of some kind. The temple of Im- 
bra will do for the Lodge-room. The women must 
make aprons as you show them. I’ll hold a levee of 
Chiefs to-night and Lodge to-morrow.’ 

“I was fair run off my legs, but I wasn’t such a fool 
as not to see what a pull this Craft business gave us. 
I showed the priests’ families how to make aprons of 
the degrees, but for Dravot’s apron the blue border and 
marks was made of turquoise lumps on white hide, not 
cloth. We took a great square stone in the temple for 
the Master’s chair, and little stones for the officers’ 
chairs, and painted the black pavement with white 
squares, and did what we could to make things regular. 

“At the levee which was held that night on the hill- 
side with big bonfires, Dravot gives out that him and 
me were Gods and sons of Alexander, and Past Grand- 
Masters in the Craft, and was come to make Kafiristan 
a country where every man should eat in peace and 
drink in quiet, and specially obey us. Then the Chiefs 
come round to shake hands, and they was so hairy and 
white and fair it was just shaking hands with old 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 47 

friends. We gave them names according as they was 
like men we had known in India — Billy Fish, Holly 
Dilworth, Pikky Kergan that was Bazar-master when 
I was at Mhow, and so on and so on. 

“The most amazing miracle was at Lodge next night. 
One of the old priests was watching us continuous, and 
I felt uneasy, for I knew we’d have to fudge the Ri- 
tual, and I didn’t know what the men knew. The old 
priest was a stranger come in from beyond the village 
of Bashkai. The minute Dravot puts on the Master’s 
apron that the girls had made for him, the priest 
fetches a whoop and a howl, and tries to overturn the 
stone that Dravot was sitting on. ‘It’s all up now,’ I 
says. ‘That comes of meddling with the Craft with- 
out warrant !’ Dravot never winked an eye, not when 
ten priests took and tilted over the Grand-Master’s 
chair — which was to say the stone of Imbra. The 
priest begins rubbing the bottom end of it to clear 
away the black dirt, and presently he shows all the 
other priests the Master’s Mark, same as was on Dra- 
vot’s apron, cut into the stone. Not even the priests 
of the temple of Imbra knew it was there. The old 
chap falls flat on his face at Dravot’s feet and kisses 
’em. ‘Luck again/ says Dravot, across the Lodge to 
me, ‘they say it’s the missing Mark that no one could 
understand the why of. We’re more than safe now.’ 
Then he bangs the butt of his gun for a gavel and 
says : — ‘By virtue of the authority vested in me by my 
own right hand and the help of Peachey, I declare my- 
self Grand-Master of all Freemasonry in Kafiristan in 
this the Mother Lodge o’ the country, and King of Ka- 
firistan equally with Peachey !’ At that he puts on his 
crown and I puts on mine — I was doing Senior War- 


4 8 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


den — and we opens the Lodge in most ample form. It 
was a amazing miracle ! The priests moved in Lodge 
through the first two degrees almost without telling, as 
if the memory was coming back to them. After that, 
Peachey and Dravot raised such as was worthy — high 
priests and Chiefs of far-off villages. Billy Fish was 
the first, and I can tell you we scared the soul out of 
him. It was not in any way according to Ritual, but 
it served our turn. We didn’t raise more than ten of 
the biggest men because we didn’t want to make the 
Degree common. And they was clamoring to be raised. 

“ ‘In another six months/ says Dravot, ‘we’ll hold 
another Communication and see how you are working/ 
Then he asks them about their villages, and learns that 
they was fighting one against the other and were fair 
sick and tired of it. And when they wasn’t doing that 
they was fighting with the Mohammedans. ‘You can 
fight those when they come into our country/ says Dra- 
vot. ‘Tell off every tenth man of your tribes for a 
Frontier guard, and send two hundred at a time to this 
valley to be drilled. Nobody is going to be shot or 
speared any more so long as he does well, and I know 
that you won’t cheat me because you’re white people 
— sons of Alexander — and not like common, black 
Mohammedans. You are my people and by God/ says 
he, running off into English at the end — ‘I’ll make a 
damned fine Nation of you, or I’ll die in the making!’ 

“I can’t tell all we did for the next six months be- 
cause Dravot did a lot I couldn’t see the hang of, and 
he learned their lingo in a way I never could. My 
work was to help the people plough, and now and again 
go out with some of the Army and see what the other 
villages were doing, and make ’em throw rope-bridges 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 49 

across the ravines which cut up the country horrid. 
Dravot was very kind to me, but when he walked up 
and down in the pine wood pulling that bloody red 
beard of his with both fists I knew he was thinking 
plans I could not advise him about, and I just waited 
for orders. 

“But Dravot never showed me disrespect before the 
people. They were afraid of me and the Army, but 
they loved Dan. He was the best of friends with the 
priests and the Chiefs ; but any one could come across 
the hills with a complaint and Dravot would hear him 
out fair, and call four priests together and say what 
was to be done. He used to call in Billy Fish from 
Bashkai, and Pikky Kergan from Shu, and an old 
Chief we called Kafuzelum — it was like enough to his 
real name — and hold councils with ’em when there was 
any fighting to be done in small villages. That was 
his Council of War, and the four priests of Bashkai, 
Shu, Khawak, and Madora was his Privy Council. Be- 
tween the lot of ’em they sent me, with forty men and 
twenty rifles, and sixty men carrying turquoises, into 
the Ghorband country to buy those hand-made Martini 
rifles, that come out of the Amir’s workshops at Kabul, 
from one of the Amir’s Herati regiments that would 
have sold the very teeth out of their mouths for tur- 
quoises. 

“I stayed at Ghorband a month, and gave the Gov- 
ernor there the pick of my baskets for hush-money, and 
bribed the Colonel of the regiment some more, and, be- 
tween the two and the tribes-people, we got more than 
^hundred hand-made Martinis, a hundred good Ko- 
hat that’ll throw to six hundred yards, and forty 

man-loads in. „ ei y b a d ammunition for the rifles. I 


50 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


came back with what I had, and distributed ’em among 
the men that the Chiefs sent to me to drill. Dravot 
was too busy to attend to those things, but the old 
Army that we first made helped me, and we turned out 
five hundred men that could drill, and two hundred 
that knew how to hold arms pretty straight. Even 
those cork-screwed, hand-made guns was a miracle to 
them. Dravot talked big about powder-shops and fac- 
tories, walking up and down in the pine wood when the 
winter was coming on. 

“ ‘I won’t make a Nation/ says he. ‘I’ll make an 
Empire! These men aren’t niggers; they’re English! 
Look at their eyes — look at their mouths. Look at the 
way they stand up. They sit on chairs in their own 
houses. They’re the Lost Tribes, or something like it, 
and they’ve grown to be English. I’ll take a census in 
the spring if the priests don’t get frightened. There 
must be a fair two million of ’em in these hills. The 
villages are full o’ little children. Two million people — 
two hundred and fifty thousand fighting men — and all 
English! They only want the rifles and a little dril- 
ling. Two hundred and fifty thousand men, ready to 
cut in on Russia’s right flank when she tries for India ! 
Peachey, man,’ he says, chewing his beard in great 
hunks, ‘we shall be Emperors — Emperors of the 
Earth! Rajah Brooke will be a suckling to us. I’ll 
treat with the Viceroy on equal terms. I’ll ask him to 
send me twelve picked English — twelve that I know 
of — to help us govern a bit. There's Mackray, Ser- 
geant-pensioner at Segowli — many’s the good dinner 
he’s given me, and his wife a pair of trousers. Ther^’ j 
Donkin, the Warder of Tounghoo Jail; thf n Y n ~ 
dreds that I could lay my hand on 111 I n( * ia * 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 51 

The Viceroy shall do it for me. I’ll send a man 
through in the spring for those men, and I’ll write for 
a dispensation from the Grand Lodge for what I’ve 
done as Grand-Master. That — and all the Sniders 
that’ll be thrown out when the native troops in India 
take up the Martini. They’ll be worn smooth, but 
they’ll do for fighting in these hills. Twelve English, 
a hundred thousand Sniders run through the Amir’s 
country in driblets — I’d be content with twenty thou- 
sand in one year — and we’d be an Empire. When 
everything was shipshape I’d hand over the crown — 
this crown I’m wearing now — to Queen Victoria on my 
knees, and she’d say: “Rise up, Sir Daniel Dravot.” 
Oh, it’s big ! It’s big, I tell you ! But there’s so much 
to be done in every place — Bashkai, Khawak, Shu, and 
everywhere else.’ 

“‘What is it?’ I says. ‘There are no more men 
coming in to be drilled this autumn. Look at those 
fat, black clouds. They’re bringing the snow.’ 

“ ‘It isn’t that,’ says Daniel, putting his hand very 
hard on my shoulder; ‘and I don’t wish to say any- 
thing that’s against you, for no other living man would 
have followed me and made me what I am. as you have 
done. You’re a first-class Commander-in-Chief, and 
the people know you ; but — it’s a big country, and 
somehow you can’t help me, Peachey, in the way I 
want to be helped.’ 

“ ‘Go to your blasted priests, then !’ I said, and I 
was sorry when I made that remark, but it did hurt me 
sore to find Daniel talking so superior when I’d drilled 
all the men, and done all he told me. 

“Don’t let’s quarrel, Peachey,’ says Daniel, without 
cursing. ‘You’re a King too, and the half of this King- 


52 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 

dom is yours; but can’t you see, Peachey, we want 
cleverer men than us now — three or four of ’em, that 
we can scatter about for our Deputies. It’s a hugeous 
great State, and I can’t always tell the right thing to 
do, and I haven’t time for all I want to do, and here’s 
the winter coming on and all.’ He put half his beard 
into his mouth, and it was as red as the gold of his 
crown. 

“ ‘I’m sorry, Daniel/ says I. ‘I’ve done all I could. 
I’ve drilled the men and shown the people how to stack 
their oats better; and I’ve brought in those tinware 
rifles from Ghorband — but I know what you’re driving 
at. I take it Kings always feel oppressed that way.’ 

“ ‘There’s another thing too,’ says Dravot, walking 
up and down. ‘The winter’s coming and these people 
won’t be giving much trouble, and if they do we can’t 
move about. I want a wife.’ 

“ ‘For Gord’s sake leave the women alone !’ I says. 
‘We’ve both got all the work we can, though I am a fool. 
Remember the Contrack, and keep clear o’ women.’ 

“ ‘The Contrack only lasted till such time as we 
was Kings; and Kings we have been these months 
past,’ says Dravot, weighing his crown in his hand. 
‘You go get a wife too, Peachey — a nice, strapping 
plump girl that’ll keep you warm in the winter. They’re 
prettier than English girls, and we can take the pick of 
’em. Boil ’em once or twice in hot water, and they’ll 
come as fair as chicken and ham.’ 

“ ‘Don’t tempt me !’ I says. ‘I will not have any 
dealings with a woman not till we are a dam’ side more 
settled than we are now. I’ve been doing the work o’ 
two men, and you’ve been doing the work o’ three. 
Let’s lie off a bit, and see if we can get some better 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING S3 

tobacco from Afghan country and run in some good 
liquor; but no women/ 

“ ‘Who’s talking o’ women?’ says Dravot. ‘I said 
wife — a Queen to breed a King’s son for the King. A 
Queen out of the strongest tribe, that’ll make them 
your blood-brothers, and that’ll lie by your side and 
tell you all the people thinks about you and their own 
affairs. That’s what I want.’ 

“ ‘Do you remember that Bengali woman I kept at 
Mogul Serai when I was a plate-layer?’ says I. ‘A fat 
lot o’ good she was to me. She taught me the lingo 
and one or two other things ; but what happened ? She 
ran away with the Station Master’s servant and half 
my month’s pay. Then she turned up at Dadur Junc- 
tion in tow of a half-caste, and had the impidence to 
say I was her husband — all among the drivers in the 
running-shed !’ 

“ ‘We’ve done with that/ says Dravot. ‘These 
women are whiter than you or me, and a Queen I 
will have for the winter months.’ 

“ ‘For the last time o’ asking, Dan, do not,’ I says. 
‘It’ll only bring us harm. The Bible says that Kings 
ain’t to waste their strength on women, ’specially when 
they’ve got a new raw Kingdom to work over.’ 

“ ‘For the last time of answering I will,’ said Dravot, 
and he went away through the pine-trees looking like a 
big red devil. The low sun hit his crown and beard 
on one side and the two blazed like hot coals. 

“But getting a wife was not as easy as Dan thought. 
He put it before the Council, and there was no answer 
till Billy Fish said that he’d better ask the girls. Dra- 

damned them all round. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ 

Billyhs, standing by the idol Imbra. Am I a dog or 


54 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 

am I not enough of a man for your wenches? Haven't 
I put the shadow of my hand over this country ? Who 
stopped the last Afghan raid?’ It was me really, but 
Dravot was too angry to remember. ‘Who brought 
your guns? Who repaired the bridges? Who's the 
Grand-Master of the sign cut in the stone?' and he 
thumped his hand on the block that he used to sit on 
in Lodge, and at Council, which opened like Lodge al- 
ways. Billy Fish said nothing and no more did the 
others. ‘Keep your hair on, Dan,' said I ; ‘and ask 
the girls. That’s how it's done at Home, and these 
people are quite English.' 

“ ‘The marriage of the King is a matter of State,' 
says Dan, in a white-hot rage, for he could feel, I hope, 
that he was going against his better mind. He walked 
out of the Council-room, and the others sat still, look- 
ing at the ground. 

“ Billy Fish,' says I to the Chief of Bashkai, ‘what's 
the difficulty here? A straight answer to a true friend.' 
‘You know,' says Billy Fish. ‘How should a man tell 
you who know everything? How can daughters of 
men marry Gods or Devils? It’s not proper.’ 

“I remembered something like that in the Bible ; but 
if, after seeing us as long as they had, they still believed 
we were Gods, it wasn't for me to undeceive them. 

“ ‘A God can do anything,’ says I. ‘If the King is 
fond of a girl he’ll not let her die.' ‘She’ll have to,' 
said Billy Fish. ‘There are all sorts of Gods and 
Devils in these mountains, and now and again a girl 
marries one of them and isn’t seen any more. Besides, 
you two know the Mark cut in the stone. Only the 
Gods know that. We thought you were men till you / 
showed the sign of the Master ' 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 55 


“I wished then that we had explained about the loss 
of the genuine secrets of a Master-Mason at the first 
go-off ; but I said nothing. All that night there was a 
blowing of horns in a little dark temple half-way down 
the hill, and I heard a girl crying fit to die. One of the 
priests told us that she was being prepared to marry 
the King. 

“ Til have no nonsense of that kind/ says Dan. T 
don’t want to interfere with your customs, but I’ll take 
my own wife/ ‘The girl’s a little bit afraid,’ says the 
priest. ‘She thinks she’s going to die, and they are a- 
heartening of her up down in the temple.’ 

“ ‘Hearten her very tender, then/ says Dravot, ‘or 
I’ll hearten you with the butt of a gun so that you’ll 
never want to be heartened again.’ He licked his lips, 
did Dan, and stayed up walking about more than half 
the night, thinking of the wife that he was going to get 
in the morning. I wasn’t any means comfortable, for 
I knew that dealings with a woman in foreign parts, 
though you was a crowned King twenty times over, 
could not but be risky. I got up very early in the 
morning while Dravot was asleep, and I saw the priests 
talking together in whispers, and the Chiefs talking to- 
gether too, and they looked at me out of the corners 
of their eyes. 

“ ‘What is up, Fish?’ I says to the Bashkai man, who 
was wrapped up in his furs and looking splendid to 
behold. 

“I can’t rightly say/ says he; ‘but if you can induce 
the King to drop all this nonsense about marriage, 
you’ll be doing him and me and yourself a great service.’ 

“ ‘That I do believe/ says I. ‘But sure, you know, 
Billy, as well as me, having fought against and for us, 


56 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


that the King and me are nothing more than two of the 
finest men that God Almighty ever made. Nothing 
more, I do assure you/ 

“ ‘That may be/ says Billy Fish, ‘and yet I should be 
sorry if it was/ He sinks his head upon his great fur 
cloak for a minute and thinks. ‘King/ says he, ‘be 
you man or God or Devil, Ell stick by you to-day. I 
have twenty of my men with me, and they will follow 
me. We’ll go to Bashkai until the storm blows over/ 

“A little snow had fallen in the night, and everything 
was white except the greasy fat clouds that blew down 
and down from the north. Dravot came out with his 
crown on his head, swinging his arms and stamping 
his feet, and looking more pleased than Punch. 

“ ‘For the last time, drop it, Dan/ says I, in a whis- 
per. ‘Billy Fish here says that there will be a row/ 

“ ‘A row among my people !’ says Dravot. ‘Not 
much. Peachey, you’re a fool not to get a wife too. 
Where’s the girl?’ says he, with a voice as loud as the 
braying of a jackass. ‘Call up all the Chiefs and 
priests, and let the Emperor see if his wife suits him/ 

“There was no need to call any one. They were all 
there leaning on their guns and spears round the clear- 
ing in the centre of the pine wood. A deputation of 
priests went down to the little temple to bring up the 
girl, and the horns blew up fit to wake the dead. Billy 
Fish saunters round and gets as close to Daniel as he 
could, and behind him stood his twenty men with match- 
locks. Not a man of them under six feet. I was next 
to Dravot, and behind me was twenty men of the regular 
Army. Up comes the girl, and a strapping wench she 
was, covered with silver and turquoises but white as 
death, and looking back every minute at the priests. 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 57 

“ ‘She'll do,’ said Dan, looking her over. ‘What's to 
be afraid of, lass? Come and kiss me.' He puts his 
arm round her. She shuts her eyes, gives a bit of a 
squeak, and down goes her face in the side of Dan’s 
flaming red beard. 

“ ‘The slut’s bitten me !’ says he, clapping his hand 
to his neck, and, sure enough, his hand was red with 
blood. Billy Fish and two of his matchlock-men 
catches hold of Dan by the shoulders and drags him 
into the Bashkai lot, while the priests howl in their 
lingo, — ‘Neither God nor Devil but a man!’ I was all 
taken aback, for a priest cut at me in front, and the 
Army behind began firing into the Bashkai men. 

“ ‘God A-mighty !' says Dan. ‘What is the mean- 
ing o’ this ?’ 

“ ‘Come back ! Come away !’ says Billy Fish. ‘Ruin 
and Mutiny is the matter. We’ll break for Bashkai if 
we can.’ 

“I tried to give some sort of orders to my men — the 
men o’ the regular Army — but it was no use, so I fired 
into the brown of ’em with an English Martini and 
drilled three beggars in a line. The vallev was full of 
shouting, howling creatures, and every soul was shriek- 
ing, ‘Not a God nor a Devil but only a man!’ The 
Bashkai troops stuck to Billy Fish all they were worth, 
but their matchlocks wasn’t half as good as the Kabul 
breech-loaders, and four of them dropped. Dan was 
bellowing like a bull, for he was very wrathy; and 
Billy Fish had a hard job to prevent him running out at 
the crowd. 

“‘We can’t stand,’ says Billy Fish. ‘Make a run 
for it down the valley ! The whole place is against us.’ 
The matchlock-men ran, and we went down the val- 


58 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 

ley in spite of Dravot’s protestations. He was swear- 
ing horribly and crying out that he was a King. The 
priests rolled great stones on us, and the regular Army 
fired hard, and there wasn’t more than six men, not 
counting Dan, Billy Fish, and Me, that came down to 
the bottom of the valley alive. 

“Then they stopped firing and the horns in the tem- 
ple blew again. “Come away — for Gord’s sake come 
away!’ says Billy Fish. 'They’ll send runners out to 
all the villages before ever we get to Bashkai. I can 
protect you there, but I can’t do anything now.’ 

“My own notion is that Dan began to go mad in his 
head from that hour. He stared up and down like a 
stuck pig. Then he was all for walking back alone 
and killing the priests with his bare hands; which he 
could have done. ‘An Emperor am, 1/ says Daniel, 
‘and next year I shall be a Knight of the Queen.’ 

“ ‘All right, Dan,’ says I ; ‘but come along now while 
there’s time.’ 

“ ‘It’s your fault,’ says he, ‘for not looking after 
your Army better. There was mutiny in the midst, 
and you didn’t know — you damned engine-driving, 
p1a+o_io. 7 u is , ^icc^onary’s-pass-hunting hound!’ He 
sat upon a rock and called me every foul name he rntiid 
lay tongue to. I was too heart-sick to care, though it 
was all his foolishness that brought the smash. 

“ ‘I’m sorry, Dan,’ says I, ‘but there’s no accounting 
for natives. This business is our Fifty-Seven. May- 
be we’ll make something out of it yet, when we’ve got 
to Bashkai.’ 

“ ‘Let’s get to Bashkai, then,’ says Dan, ‘and, by God, 
when I come back here again I’ll sweep the valley so 
there isn’t a bug in a blanket left !’ 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 59 

“We walked all that day, and all that night Dan was 
stumping up and down on the snow, chewing his beard 
and muttering to himself. 

“ ‘There's no hope o' getting clear/ said Billy Fish. 
‘The priests will have sent runners to the villages to say 
that you are only men. Why didn’t you stick on as 
Gods till things was more settled? I’m a dead man/ 
says Billy Fish, and he throws himself down on the 
snow and begins to pray to his Gods. 

“Next morning we was in a cruel bad country — all 
up and down, no level ground at all, and no food either. 
The six Bashkai men looked at Billy Fish hungry-wise 
as if they wanted to ask something, but they said never 
a word. At noon we came to the top of a flat moun- 
tain all covered with snow, and when we climbed up 
into it, behold, there was an Army in position waiting 
in the middle ! 

“ ‘The runners have been very quick/ says Billy 
Fish, with a little bit of a laugh. ‘They are waiting for 
us.’ 

“Three or four men began to fire from the enemy’s 
side, and a chance shot took Daniel in the calf of the 
leg. That brought him to HL senses. He looks across 
the snow at the Army, and sees the rifles that we had 
brought into the country. 

“We’re done for,” says he. ‘They are Englishmen, 
these people, — and it’s my blasted nonsense that has 
brought you to this. Get back, Billy Fish, and take 
your n away ; you’ve done what you could, and now 
Cut for it. Carnehan/ says he, ‘shake hands with me and 
go along with Billy. Maybe they won’t kill you. I’ll go 
and meet ’em alone. It’s me that did it. Me, the King !’ 

“ ‘Go !’ says I. ‘Go to Hell, Dan ! I’m with you 


6o THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


here. Billy Fish, you clear out, and we two will meet 
those folk/ 

“ ‘Em a Chief/ says Billy Fish, quite quiet. T stay 
with you. My men can go/ 

“The Bashkai fellows didn’t wait for a second word 
but ran off, and Dan and Me and Billy Fish walked 
across to where the drums were drumming and the 
horns were horning. It was cold — awful cold. I’ve 
got that cold in the back of my head now. There’s a 
lump of it there.” 

The punkah-coolies had gone to sleep. Two kero- 
sene lamps were blazing in the office, and the perspira- 
tion poured down my face and splashed on the blotter 
as I leaned forward. Carnehan was shivering, and I 
feared that his mind might go. I wiped my face, took 
a fresh grip of the piteously mangled hands, and said : 
— “What happened after that?” 

The momentary shift of my eyes had broken the 
clear current. 

“What was you pleased to say?” whined Carnehan. 
“They took them without any sound. Not a little 
whisper all along the snow, not though the King 
knocked down the first man that set hand on him — not 
though old Peachey fired his last cartridge into the 
brown of ’em. Not a single solitary sound did those 
swines make. They just closed up tight, and I tell you 
their furs stunk. There was a man called Billy Fish, 
a good friend of us all, and they cut his throat, Sir, 
then and there, like a pig ; and the King kicks np the 
bloody snow and says : — ‘We’ve had a dashed fine run 
for our money. What’s coming next?’ But Peachey, 
Peachey Taliaferro, I tell you, Sir, in confidence as 
betwixt two friends, he lost his head, Sir. No, he 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 61 


didn’t neither. The King lost his head, so he did, all 
along o’ one of those cunning rope-bridges. Kindly- 
let me have the paper-cutter, Sir. It tilted this way. 
They marched him a mile across that snow to a rope- 
bridge over a ravine with a river at the bottom. You 
may have seen such. They prodded him behind like an 
ox. ‘Damn your eyes!’ says the King. ‘D’you sup- 
pose I can’t die like a gentleman?’ He turns to 
Peachey — Peachey that was crying like a child. ‘I’ve 
brought you to this, Peachey,’ says he. ‘Brought you 
out of your happy life to be killed in Kafiristan, where 
you was late Commander-in-Chief of the Emperor’s 
forces. Say you forgive me, Peachey.’ ‘I do,’ says 
Peachey. ‘Fully and freely do I forgive you, Dan.’ 
‘Shake hands, Peachey,’ says he. ‘I’m going now.’ 
Out he goes, looking neither right nor left, and when 
he was plumb in the middle of those dizzy dancing 
ropes, ‘Cut, you beggars,’ he shouts ; and they cut, and 
old Dan fell, turning round and round and round 
twenty thousand miles, for he took half an hour to fall 
till he struck the water, and I could see his body caught 
on a rock with the gold crown close beside. 

“But do you know what they did to Peachey be- 
tween two pine trees? They crucified him, Sir, as 
Peachey’s hand will show. They used wooden pegs 
for his hands and his feet ; and he didn’t die. He hung 
there and screamed, and they took him down next day, 
and said it was a miracle he wasn’t dead. They took 
him down — poor old Peachey that hadn’t done them 
any harm — that hadn’t done them any ...” 

He rocked to and fro and wept bitterly, wiping his 
eyes with the back of his scarred hands and moaning 
like a child for some ten minutes. 


62 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 


“They was cruel enough to feed him up in the tem- 
ple, because they said he was more of a God than old 
Daniel that was a man. They they turned him out on 
the snow, and told him to go home, and Peachey came 
home in about a year, begging alone the roads quite 
safe ; for Daniel Dravot he walked before and said : — 
‘Come along, Peachey. It’s a big thing we’re doing.’ 
The mountains they danced at night, and the moun- 
tains they tried to fall on Peachey’s head, but Dan 
he held up his hand, and Peachey came along bent 
double. He never let go of Dan’s hand, and he never 
let go of Dan’s head. They gave it to him as a present 
in the temple, to remind him not to come again, and 
though the crown was pure gold, and Peachey was 
starving, never would Peachey sell the same. You 
knew Dravot, Sir ! You knew Right Worshipful 
Brother Dravot ! Look at him now !” 

He fumbled in the mass of rags round his bent waist ; 
brought out a black horsehair bag embroidered with 
silver thread; and shook therefrom on to my table — 
the dried, withered head of Daniel Dravot ! The 
morning sun that had long been paling the lamps struck 
the red beard and blind -sunken eyes; struck, too, a 
heavy circlet of gold studded with raw turquoises, that 
Carnehan had placed tenderly on the battered temples. 

“You behold now,” said Carnehan, “the Emperor in 
his habit as he lived — the King of Kafiristan with his 
crown upon his head. Poor old Daniel that was a 
monarch once!” 

I shuddered, for, in spite of defacements manifold, 
I recognized the head of the man of Marwar Junc- 
tion. Carnehan rose to go. I attempted to stop him. 
He was not fit to walk abroad. “Let me take away 


THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING 63 


the whiskey, and give me a little money/’ he gasped. 
“I was a King once. I’ll go to the Deputy Commis- 
sioner and ask to set in the Poorhouse till I get my 
health. No, thank you, I can’t wait till you get a car- 
riage for me. I’ve urgent private affairs — in the south 
— at Mar war.” 

He shambled out of the office and departed in the 
direction of the Deputy Commissioner’s house. That 
day at noon I had occasion to go down the blinding hot 
Mall, and I saw a crooked man crawling along the 
white dust of the roadside, his hat in his hand, quaver- 
ing dolorously after the fashion of street-singers at 
Home. There was not a soul in sight, and he was out 
of all possible earshot of the houses. And he sang 
through his nose, turning his head from right to left : 

“The Son of Man goes forth to war, 

A golden crown to gain; 

His blood-red banner strearn» afar — 

Who follows in his train?" 

I waited to hear no more, but put the poor wretch 
into my carriage and drove him off to the nearest mis- 
sionary for eventual transfer to the Asylum. He re- 
peated the hymn twice while he was with me whom 
he did not in the least recognize, and I left him sing- 
ing it to the missionary. 

Two days later I inquired after his welfare of the 
Superintendent of the Asylum. 

"He was admitted suffering from sunstroke. He 
died early yesterday morning,” said the Superintend- 
ent. “Is it true that he was half an hour bareheaded 
in the sun at midday?” 

“Yes,” said I, “but do you happen to know if he had 
anything upon him by any chance when he died ?” 

“Not to my knowledge,” said the Superintendent. 

And there the matter rests. 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 

I 


“But if it be a girl?” 

“Lord of my life, it cannot be ! I have prayed for so 
many nights, and sent gifts to Sheikh Badl’s shrine so 
often, that I know God will give us a son — a man- 
child that shall grow into a man. Think of this and be 
glad. My mother shall be his mother till I can take 
him again, and the mullah of the Pattan Mosque shall 
cast his nativity — God send he be born in an auspicious 
hour! — and then, and then thou wilt never weary of 
me, thy slave.” 

“Since when hast thou been a slave, my queen?” 

“Since the beginning — till this mercy came to me. 
How could I be sure of thy love when I knew that I 
had been bought with silver?” 

“Nay, that was the dowry. I paid it to thy mother.” 

“And she has buried it, and sits upon it all day long 
like a hen. What talk is yours of dowry? I was 
bought as though I had been a Lucknow dancing-girl 
instead of a child.” 

“Art thou sorry fui tk° sale?” 

“I have sorrowed ; but to-day I am glad. Thou wilt 
never cease to love me now? Answer, my king.” 

“Never — never. No.” 

“Not even though the mem-log — the white women 
of thy own blood — love thee ? And remember, I have 
watched them driving in the evening; they are very 
fair.” 

“I have seen fire-balloons by the hundred, I have 
seen the moon, and — then I saw no more fire balloons.” 

64 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 65 

Ameera clapped her hands and laughed. “Very 
good talk/’ she said. Then, with an assumption of 
great stateliness : “It is enough. Thou hast my permis- 
sion to depart — if thou wilt.” 

The man did not move. He was sitting on a low red- 
lacquered couch in a room furnished only with a blue- 
and-white floor-cloth, some rugs, and a very complete 
collection of native cushions. At his feet sat a woman 
of sixteen, and she was all but all the world in his eyes. 
By every rule and law she should have been otherwise, 
for he was an Englishman and she a Mussulman’s 
daughter, bought two years before from her mother, 
who, being left without money, would have sold 
Ameera, . shrieking, to the Prince of Darkness, if the 
price had been sufficient. 

It was a contract entered into with a light heart. But 
even before the girl had reached her bloom she came 
to fill the greater portion of John Holden’s life. For 
her and the withered hag her mother he had taken a 
little house overlooking the great red-walled city, and 
found, when the marigolds had sprung up by the well 
in the courtyard, and Ameera had established herself 
according to her own ideas of comfort, and her mother 
had ceased grumbling at the inadequacy of the cooking- 
places, the distance from the daily market, and matters 
of housekeeping in general, that the house was to him 
his home. Any one could enter his bachelor’s bunga- 
low by day or night, and the life that he led there was 
an unlovely one. In the house in the city his feet only 
could pass beyond the outer court-yard to the women's 
rooms ; and when the big wooden gate was bolted be- 
hind him he was king in his own territory, with Ameera 
for queen. And there was going to be added to this 


66 WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 


kingdom a third person, whose arrival Holden felt in- 
clined to resent. It interfered with his perfect hap- 
piness. It disarranged the orderly peace of the house 
that was his own. But Ameera' was wild with delight 
at the thought of it, and her mother not less so. The 
love of a man, and particularly a white man, was at the 
best an inconstant affair, but it might, both women 
argued, be held fast by a baby’s hands. “And then,” 
Ameera would always say — “then he will never 
care for the white mem-log. I hate them all — I hate 
them all !” 

“He will go back to his own people in time,” said the 
mother, “but, by the blessing of God, that time is yet 
afar off.” 

Holden sat silent on the couch, thinking of the fu- 
ture, and his thoughts were not pleasant. The draw- 
backs of a double life are manifold. The government, 
with singular care, had ordered him out of the station 
for a fortnight on special duty, in the place of a man 
who was watching by the bedside of a sick wife. The 
verbal notification of the transfer had been edged by a 
cheerful remark that Holden ought to think himself 
lucky in being a bachelor and a free man. He came 
to break the news to Ameera. 

“It is not good,” she said, slowly, “but it is not all 
bad. There is my mother here, and no harm will come 
to me — unless, indeed, I die of pure joy. Go thou to 
thy work, and think no troublesome thoughts. When 
the days are done, I believe . . . nay, I am sure. And — 
and then I shall lay him in thy arms, and thou wilt love 
me forever. The train goes to-night — at midnight, is 
it not? Go now, and do not let thy heart be heavy by 
cause of me. But thou will not delay in returning! 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 67 


Thou wilt not stay on the road to talk to the bold white 
mem-log! Come back to me swiftly, my life !” 

As he left the court-yard to reach his horse, that was 
tethered to the gate-post, Holden spoke to the white- 
haired old watchman who guarded the house, and bid 
him under certain contingencies dispatch the filled-up 
telegraph form that Holden gave him. It was all that 
could be done, and, with the sensations of a man who 
has attended his own funeral, Holden went away by the 
night mail to his exile. Every hour of the day he 
dreaded the arrival of the telegram, and every hour of 
the night he pictured to himself the death of Ameera. 
In consequence, his work for the state was not of first- 
rate quality, nor was his temper toward his colleagues 
of the most amiable. The fortnight ended without a 
sign from his home, and, torn to pieces by his anxieties, 
Holden returned to be swallowed up for two precious 
hours by a dinner at the club, wherein he heard, as a 
man hears in a swoon, voices telling him how execrably 
he had performed the other man’s duties, and how he 
had endeared himself to all his associates. Then he 
fled on horseback through the night with his heart in 
his mouth. There was no answer at first to his blows 
on the gate, and he had just wheeled his horse round 
to kick it in, when Pir Khan appeared with a lantern 
and held his stirrup. 

“Has aught occurred?” said Holden. 

“The news does not come from my mouth, Protector 
of the Poor, but” — He held out his shaking hand, as 
befitted the bearer of good news who is entitled to a 
reward. 

Holden hurried through the court-yard. A light 
burned in the upper room. His horse neighed in the 


68 WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 


gateway, and he heard a pin-pointed wail that sent all 
the blood into the apple of his throat. It was a new 
voice, but it did not prove that Ameera was alive. 

“Who is there ?” he called up the narrow brick stair- 
case. 

There was a cry of delight from Ameera, and then 
the voice of her mother, tremulous with old age and 
pride: “We be two women, and — the — man — thy son.” 

On the threshold of the room Holden stepped on a 
naked dagger that was laid there to avert ill-luck, and 
it broke at the hilt under his impatient heel. 

“God is great!” cooed Ameera in the half-light. 
“Thou hast taken his misfortunes on thy head.” 

“Ay, but how is it with thee, life of my life? Old 
woman, how is it with her?” 

“She has forgotten her sufferings for joy that the 
child is born. There is no harm; but speak softly,” 
said the mother. 

“It only needed thy presence to make me all well,” 
said Ameera. “My king, thou hast been very long 
away. What gifts hast thou for me? Ah, ah! It is 
I that bring gifts this time. Look, my life, look! Was 
there ever such a babe? Nay, I am too weak even to 
clear my arm from him.” 

“Rest, then, and do not talk. I am here, bachheri” 
(little woman). 

“Well said, for there is a bond and a heel-rope [pee- 
charee] between us now that nothing can break. Look 
— canst thou see in this light? He is without spot or 
blemish. Never was such a man-child. Y a illah! he 
shall be a pundit — no, a trooper of the queen. And, my 
life, dost thou love me as well as ever, though I am 
faint and sick and worn? Answer truly.” 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 69 

“Yea. I love as I have loved, with all my soul. Lie 
still, pearl, and rest.” 

“Then do not go. Sit by my side here — so. Mother, 
the lord of this house needs a cushion. Bring it.” There 
was an almost imperceptible movement on the part of 
the new life that lay in the hollow of Ameera’s arm. 
“Aho !” she said, her voice breaking with love. “The 
babe is a champion from his birth. He is kicking me 
in the side with mighty kicks. Was there ever such a 
babe ? And he is ours to us — thine and mine. Put thy 
hand on his head, but carefully, for he is very young, 
and men are unskilled in such matters.” 

Very cautiously Holden touched with the tips of his 
fingers the downy head. 

“He is-of the Faith,” said Ameera; “for, lying here 
in the night-watches, I whispered the Call to Prayer 
and the Profession of Faith into his ears. And it is 
most marvelous that he was born upon a Friday, as I 
was born. Be careful of him, my life; but he can al- 
most grip with his hands.” 

Holden found one helpless little hand that closed 
feebly on his finger. And the clutch ran through his 
limbs till it settled about his heart. Till then his sole 
thought had been for Ameera. He began to realize 
that there was some one else in the world, but he could 
not feel that it was a veritable son with a soul. He sat 
down to think, and Ameera dozed lightly. 

“Get hence, sahib,” said her mother, under her 
breath. “It is not good that she should find you here 
on waking. She must be still.” 

“I go,” said Holden, submissively. “Here be rupees. 
See that my baba ge ts fat and finds all that he needs.” 

The chink of the silver roused Ameera. “I am his 


70 WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 

mother, and no hireling,” she said, weakly. “Shall I 
look to him more or less for the sake of money? 
Mother, give it back. I have borne my lord a son.” 

The deep sleep of weakness came upon her almost 
before the sentence was completed. Holden went 
down to the court-yard very softly, with his heart at 
ease. Pir Khan, the old watchman, was chuckling with 
delight. 

“This house is now complete,” he said, and without 
further comment thrust into Holden’s hands the hilt of 
a sabre worn many years ago, when Pir Khan served 
the queen in the police. The bleat of a tethered goat 
came from the well-curb. 

“There be two,” said Pir Khan — “two goats of the 
best. I bought them, and they cost much money ; and 
since there is no birth-party assembled, their flesh will 
be all mine. Strike craftily, sahib. ’Tis an ill-balanced 
sabre at the best. Wait till they raise their heads from 
cropping the marigolds.” 

“And why?” said Holden, bewildered. 

“For the birth sacrifice. What else ? Otherwise the 
child, being unguarded from fate, may die. The Pro- 
tector of the Poor knows the fitting words to be said.” 

Holden had learned them once, with little thought 
that he would ever say them in earnest. The touch 
of the cold sabre-hilt in his palm turned suddenly to the 
clinging grip of the child upstairs — the child that was 
his own son — and a dread of loss filled him. 

“Strike!” said Pir Khan. “Never life came into the 
world but life was paid for it. See, the goats have 
raised their heads. Now ! With a drawing cut !” 

Hardly knowing what he did, Holden cut twice as 
he muttered the Mohammedan prayer that runs : “Al- 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 71 

mighty! In place of this my son I offer life for life, 
blood for blood, head for head, bone for bone, hair for 
hair, skin for skin.” The waiting horse snorted and 
bounded in his pickets at the smell of the raw blood 
that spurted over Holden’s riding-boots. 

“Well smitten!” said Pir Khan, wiping the sabre. 
“A swordsman was lost in thee. Go with a light heart, 
heaven born. I am thy servant and the servant of thy 
son. May the Presence live a thousand years, and 
. . . the flesh of the goats is all mine?” 

Pir Khan drew back richer by a month’s pay. Hol- 
den swung himself into the saddle and rode off through 
the low-hanging wood smoke of the evening. He was 
full of riotous exultation, alternating with a vast vague 
tenderness directed toward no particular object, that 
made him choke as he bent over the neck of his un- 
easy horse. “I never felt like this in my life,” he 
thought. “I’ll go to the club and pull myself together.” 

A game of pool was beginning, and the room was 
full of men. Holden entered, eager to get to the light 
and the company of his fellows, singing at the top of 
his voice: 

“ ‘In Baltimore a- walking, a lady I did meet.’ ” 

“Did you ?” said the club secretary from his corner. 
“Did she happen to tell you that your boots were wring- 
ing wet? Great goodness, man, it’s blood!” 

“Bosh !” said Holden, picking his cue from the rack. 
“May I cut in? It’s dew. I’ve been riding through 
high crops. My faith! my boots are in a mess, 
though ! 

“ ‘And if it be a girl, she shall wear a wedding ring; 

And if it be a boy, he shall fight for his king; 

With his dirk and his cap, and his little jacket blue, 

He shall walk the quarter-deck’ ” — 


72 WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 

“Yellow and blue — green next player,” said the 
marker, monotonously. 

“ ‘He shall walk the quarter-deck’ — am I green, 
marker ? — ‘he shall walk the quarter-deck’ — ouch ! 
that’s a bad shot ! — ‘as his daddy used to do !’ ” 

“I don’t see that you have anything to crow about,” 
said a zealous junior civilian, acidly. “The govern- 
ment is not exactly pleased with your work when you 
relieved Sanders.” 

“Does that mean a wigging from headquarters?” said 
Holden, with an abstracted smile. “I think I can stand 
it.” 

The talk beat up round the ever-fresh subject of each 
man’s work, and steadied Holden till it was time to go 
to his dark, empty bungalow, where his butler received 
him as one who knew all his affairs. Holden remained 
awake for the greater part of the night, and his dreams 
were pleasant ones. 


II 


“How old is he now?” 

“Fa illah! What a man’s question! He is all but 
six weeks old ; and on this night I go up to the house- 
top with thee, my life, to count the stars. For that is 
auspicious. And he was born on a Friday, under the 
sign of the Sun, and it has been told to me that he will 
outlive us both and get wealth. Can we wish for aught 
better, beloved?” 

“There is nothing better. Let us go up to the roof, 
and thou shalt count the stars — but a few only, for the 
sky is heavy with cloud.” 

“The winter rains are late, and maybe they come 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 73 

out of season. Come, before all the stars are hid. I 
have put on my richest jewels.” 

“Thou hast forgotten the best of all.” 

“Ai ! Ours. He comes also. He has never yet seen 
the skies.” 

Ameera climbed the narrow staircase that led to the 
flat roof. The child, placid and unwinking, lay in the 
hollow of her right arm, gorgeous in silver-fringed 
muslin, with a small skull-cap on his head. Ameera 
wore all that she valued most. The diamond nose- 
stud that takes the place of the Western patch in draw- 
ing attention to the curve of the nostril, the gold orna- 
ment in the centre of the forehead studded with tallow- 
drop emeralds and flawed rubies, the heavy circlet of 
beaten gold that was fastened round her neck by the 
softness of the pure metal, and the chinking curb-pat- 
terned silver anklets hanging low over the rosy ankle- 
bone. She was dressed in jade-green muslin, as be- 
fitted a daughter of the Faith, and from shoulder to 
elbow and elbow to wrist ran bracelets of silver tied 
with floss silk, frail glass bangles slipped over the wrist 
in proof of the slenderness of the hand, and certain 
heavy gold bracelets that had no part in her country’s 
ornaments, but since they were Holden’s gift, and 
fastened with a cunning European snap, delighted her 
immensely. 

They sat down by the low white parapet of the roof, 
overlooking the city and its lights. 

“They are happy down there,” said Ameera. “But 
I do not think that they are as happy as we. Nor do I 
think the white mem-log are as happy. And thou?” 

“I know they are not.” 

“How dost thou know ?” 


74 WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 

“They give their children over to the nurses/' 

“I have never seen that,” said Arneera, with a sigh, 
“nor do I wish to see. Ahi !” — she dropped her heaa 
on Holden’s shoulder — “I have counted forty stars, 
and I am tired. Look at the child, love of my life. He 
is counting, too.” 

The baby was staring with round eyes at the dark of 
the heavens. Arneera placed him in Holden’s arms, 
and he lay there without a cry. 

“What shall we call him among ourselves ?” she said. 
“Look! Art thou ever tired of looking? He carries 
thy very eyes ! But the mouth — ” 

“Is thine, most dear. Who should know better than 
I?” 

“ ’Tis such a feeble mouth. Oh, so small ! And yet 
it holds my heart between its lips. Give him to me 
now. He has been too long away.” 

“Nay, let him lie; he has not yet begun to cry.” 

“When he cries thou wilt give him back, eh ? What 
a man of mankind thou art ! If he cried, he were only 
the dearer to me. But, my life, what little name shall 
we give him?” 

The small body lay close to Holden’s heart. It was 
utterly helpless and very soft. He scarcely dared to 
breathe for fear of crushing it. The caged green 
parrot, that is regarded as a sort of guardian spirit in 
most native households, moved on its perch and flut- 
tered a drowsy wing. 

“There is the answer,” said Holden. “Mian Mittu 
has spoken. He shall be the parrot. When he is 
ready he will talk mightily, and run about. Mian Mittu 
is the parrot in thy — in the Mussulman tongue, is it 
not?” 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 75 

“Why put me so far off?” said Ameera, fretfully. 
“Let it be like unto some English name — but not 
wholly. For he is mine.” 

“Then call him Tota, for that is likest English.” 

“Ay, Tota; and that is still the parrot. Forgive me, 
my lord, for a minute ago ; but, in truth, he is too little 
to wear all the weight of Mian Mittu for name. He 
shall be Tota — our Tota to us. Hearest thou, oh, small 
one? Littlest, thou art Tota.” 

She touched the child’s cheek, and he, waking, 
wailed, and it was necessary to return him to his 
mother, who soothed him with the wonderful rhyme of 
“Are koko, Ja re koko!” which says: 

“Oh, crow! Go crow! Baby’s sleeping 1 sound, 

And the wild plums grow in the jungle, only a penny a pound, — 
Only a penny a pound, Baba —* only a penny a pound.” 

Reassured many times as to the price of those plums, 
Tota cuddled himself down to sleep. The two sleek 
white well-bullocks in the court-yard were steadily 
chewing the cud of their evening meal ; old Pir Khan 
squatted at the head of Holden’s horse, his police sabre 
across his knees, pulling drowsily at a big water-pipe 
that croaked like a bull-frog in a pond. Ameera’s 
mother sat spinning in the lower veranda, and the 
wooden gate was shut and barred. The music of a 
marriage procession came to the roof above the gentle 
hum of the city, and a string of flying- foxes crossed the 
face of the low moon. 

“I have prayed,” said Ameera, after a long pause, 
with her chin in her hand — “I have prayed for two 
things. First, that I may die in thy stead, if thy death 
is demanded ; and in the second, that I may die in the 


76 WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 

place of the child. I have prayed to the Prophet and 
to Beebee Miriam. 1 Thinkest thou either will hear?” 

“From thy lips who would not hear the lightest 
word ?” 

“I asked for straight talk, and thou hast given me 
sweet talk. Will my prayers be heard?” 

“How can I say? God is very good.” 

“Of that I am not sure. Listen now. When I die 
or the child dies, w’hat is thy fate? Living, thou wilt 
return to the bold white mem-log, for kind calls to 
kind.” 

“Not always.” 

“With a woman, no. With a man it is otherwise. 
Thou wilt in this life, later on, go back to thine own 
folk. That I could almost endure, for I should be 
dead. But in thy very death thou wilt be taken away 
to a strange place and a paradise that I do not know.” 

“Will it be paradise?” 

“Surely; for what God would harm thee? But we 
two — I and the child — shall be elsewhere, and we can- 
not come to thee, nor canst thou come to us. In the 
old days, before the child was born, I did not think of 
these things ; but now I think of them perpetually. It 
is very hard talk.” 

“It will fall as it will fall. To-morrow we do not 
know, but to-day and love we know well. Surely we 
are happy now.” 

“So happy that it were well to make our happiness 
assured. And thy Beebee Miriam should listen to me ; 
for she' is also a woman. But then she would envy 
me — It is not seemly for men to worship a woman.” 


iThe Virgin Mary 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 77 

Holden laughed aloud at Ameera’s little spasm of 
jealousy. 

“It is not seemly ? Why didst thou not turn me from 
worship of thee, then?” 

“Thou a worshipper! And of me! My king, for 
all thy sweet words, well I know that I am thy servant 
and thy slave, and the dust under thy feet. And I 
would not have it otherwise. See !” 

Before Holden could prevent her she stooped for- 
ward and touched his feet; recovering herself with a 
little laugh, she hugged Tota closer to her bosom. 
Then, almost savagely : 

“Is it true that the bold white mem-log live for three 
times the length of my life? Is it true that they make 
their marriages not before they are old women?” 

“They marry as do others — when they are women.” 

“That I know, but they wed when they are twenty- 
five. Is that true?” 

“That is true.” 

“Y a illah! At twenty-five ! Who would of his own 
will take a wife even of eighteen? She is a woman — 
aging every hour. Twenty-five! I shall be an old 
woman at that age, and — Those mem-log remain 
young forever. How I hate them !” 

“What have they to do with us?” 

“I cannot tell. I know only that there may now be 
alive on this earth a woman ten years older than I who 
may come to thee and take thy love ten years after I 
am an old woman, grey-headed, and the nurse of Tota’s 
son. That is unjust and evil. They should die too.” 

“Now, for all thy years thou art a child, and shalt 
be picked up and carried down the stair-case.” 

“Tota! Have a care for Tota, my lord! Thou, at 


78 WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 

least, art as foolish as any babe!” Ameera tucked 
Tota out of harm’s way in the hollow in her neck, and 
was carried downstairs, laughing, in Holden’s arms, 
while Tota opened his eyes and smiled, after the man- 
ner of the lesser angels. 

He was a silent infant, and almost before Holden 
could realize that he was in the world, developed into 
a small gold-colored godling and unquestioned despot 
of the house overlooking the city. Those were months 
of absolute happiness to Holden and Ameera — hap- 
piness withdrawn from the world, shut in behind the 
wooden gate that Pir Khan guarded. By day Holden 
did his work, with an immense pity for such as were 
not so fortunate as himself, and a sympathy for ‘'mall 
children that amazed and amused many mothers at the 
little station gatherings. At nightfall he returned to 
Ameera — Ameera full of the wondrous doings of To- 
ta; how he had been seen to clap his hands together 
and move his fingers with intention and purpose, which 
was manifestly a miracle ; how, later, he had of his own 
initiative crawled out of his low bedstead on to the 
floor, and swayed on both feet for the space of three 
breaths. “And they were long breaths, for my heart 
stood still with delight,” said Ameera. 

Then he took the beasts into his councils — the well- 
bullocks, the little grey squirrels, the mongoose that 
lived in a hole near the well, and especially Mian Mit- 
tu, the parrot, whose tail he grievously pulled, and 
Mian Mittu screamed till Ameera and Holden arrived. 

“Oh, villain! Child of strength! This is to thy 
brother on the house-top! Tobah, tobah! Fy! fy! 
But I know a charm to make him wise as Suleiman and 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 79 

Aflatoun. 1 Now look,” said Ameera. She drew from 
an embroidered bag a handful of almonds. “See ! we 
count seven. In the name of God !” She placed Mian 
Mittu, very angry and rumpled, on the top of his cage, 
and, seating herself between the babe and the bird, 
cracked and peeled an almond less white than her teeth. 
“This is a true charm, my life ; and do not laugh. See ! 
I give the parrot one half and Tota the other.” Mian 
Mittu, with careful beak, took his share from beneath 
Ameera’s lips, and she kissed the other half into the 
mouth of the child, who eat it slowly, with wondering 
eyes. “This I will do each day of seven, and without 
doubt he who is ours will be a bold speaker and wise. 
Eh, Tota, what wilt thou be when thou art a man and 
I am grey-headed?” Tota tucked his fat legs into 
adorable creases. He could crawl, but he was not 
going to waste the spring of his youth in idle speech. 
He wanted Mian Mittu’s tail to tweak. 

When he was advanced to the dignity of a silver belt 
— which, with a magic square engraved on silver and 
hung round his neck, made up the greater part of his 
clothing — he staggered on a perilous journey down the 
garden to Pir Khan, and proffered him all his jewels 
in exchange for one little ride on Holden’s horse. He 
had seen his mother’s mother chaffering with peddlers 
in the veranda. Pir Khan wept, set the untried feet 
on his own grey head in sign of fealty, and brought the 
bold adventurer to his mother’s arms, vowing that Tota 
would be a leader of men ere his beard was grown. 

One hot evening, while he sat on the root between 
his father and mother, watching the never-ending war- 


1 Solomon and Plato 


8o WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 


fare of the kites that the city boys flew, he demanded 
a kite of his own, with Pir Khan to fly it, because he 
had $ fear of dealing with anything larger than himself ; 
and when Holden called him a “spark,” he rose to his 
feet and answered slowly, in defense of his new-found 
individuality: “Hum ’park nahin hai. Hum admi 
hai.” (I am no spark, but a man.) 

The protest made Holden choke, and devote himself 
very seriously to a consideration of Tota’s future. 

He need hardly have taken the trouble. The delight 
of that life was too perfect to endure. Therefore it 
was taken away, as many things are taken away in In- 
dia, suddenly and without warning. The little lord of 
the house, as Pir Khan called him, grew sorrowful and 
complained of pains, who had never known the mean- 
ing of pain. Ameera, wild with terror, watched him 
through the night, and in the dawning of the second 
day the life was shaken out of him by fever — the seas- 
onal autumn fever. It seemed altogether impossible 
that he could die, and neither Ameera nor Holden at 
first believed the evidence of the body on the bedstead. 
Then Ameera beat her head against the wall, and 
would have flung herself down the well in the garden 
had Holden not restrained her by main force. 

One mercy only was granted to Holden. He rode to 
his office in broad daylight, and found waiting him an 
unsually heavy mail that demanded concentrated at- 
tention and hard work. He was not, however, alive 
to this kindness of the gods. 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 81 


III 

The first shock of the bullet is no more than a brisk 
pinch. The wrecked body does not send in its protest 
to the soul till ten or fifteen seconds later. Then 
comes thirst, throbbing, and agony, and a ridiculous 
amount of screaming. Holden realized his pain slow- 
ly, exactly as he had realized his happiness, and with 
the same imperious necessity for hiding all trace of it. 
In the beginning he only felt that there had been a loss, 
and that Ameera needed comforting where she sat 
with her head on her knees, shivering as Mian Mittu, 
from the house-top, called “Tota ! Tota ! Tota !” Later 
all his world and the daily life of it rose up to hurt 
him. It was an outrage that any one of the children 
at the band-stand in the evening should be alive and 
clamorous when his own child lay dead. It was more 
than mere pain when one of them touched him, and 
stories told by overfond fathers of their children’s lat- 
est performances cut him to the quick. He could not 
declare his pain. He had neither help, comfort, nor 
sympathy, and Ameera, at the end of each weary day, 
would lead him through the hell of self -questioning re- 
proach which is reserved for those who have lost a 
child, and believe that with a little — just a little — more 
care it might have been saved. There are not many 
hells worse than this, but he knows one who has sat 
down temporarily to consider whether he is or is not 
responsible for the death of his wife. 

“Perhaps,” Ameera would say, “I did not take suf- 
ficient heed. Did I, or did I not? The sun on the 
roof that day when he played so long alone, and I was 
— ahi! braiding my hair — it may be that the sun then 


82 WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 


bred the fever. If I had warned him from the sun he 
might have lived. But, oh, my life, say that I am guilt- 
less ! Thou knowest that I loved him as I loved thee ! 
Say that there is no blame on me, or I shall die — I shall 
die !” 

“There is no blame. Before God, none. It was 
written, and how could we do aught to save? What 
has been, has been. Let it go, beloved/' 

“He was all my heart to me. How can I let the 
thought go when my arm tells me every night that he is 
not here? A hi! ahi! Oh, Tota, come back to me — 
come back again, and let us be all together as it was 
before!” 

“Peace! peace! For thine own sake, and for mine 
also, if thou lovest me, rest.” 

“By this I know thou dost not care; and how 
shouldst thou? The white men have hearts of stone 
and souls of iron. Oh, that I had married a man of 
mine own people — though he beat me — and had never 
eaten the bread of an alien !” 

“Am I an alien, mother of my son?” 

“What else, sahib? . . . Oh, forgive me — for- 

give! The death has driven me mad. Thou art the 
life of my heart, and the light of my eyes, and the 
breath of my life, and — and I have put thee from me, 
though it was but for a moment. If thou goest away, 
to whom shall I look for help ? Do not be angry. In- 
deed, it was the pain that spoke, and not thy slave.” 

“I know — I know. We be two who were three. 
The greater need, therefore, that we should be one.” 

They were sitting on the roof, as of custom. The 
night was a warm one in early spring, and sheet-light- 
ning was dancing on the horizon to a broken tune 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 83 


played by far-off thunder. Ameera settled herself in 
Holden’s arms. 

“The dry earth is lowing like a cow for the rain, and 
I — I am afraid. It was not like this when we counted 
the stars. But thou lovest me as much as before, 
though a bond is taken away? Answer.” 

“I love more, because a new bond has come out of 
the sorrow that we have eaten together ; and that thou 
knowest.” 

“Yea, I know,” said Ameera, in a very small whis- 
per. “But it is good to hear thee say so, my life, who 
art so strong to help. I will be a child no more, but a 
woman and an aid to thee. Listen. Give me my sitar , 
and I- will sing bravely.” 

She took the light silver-studded sitar, and began a 
song of the great hero Raja Rasalu. The hand failed 
on the strings, the tune halted, checked, and at a low 
note turned off to the poor little nursery rhyme about 
the wicked crow : 

“ ‘And the wild plums grow in the jungle, only a penny a pound — 

Only a penny a pound. Baba — only’ ” — 


Then came the tears and the piteous rebellion against 
fate, till she slept, moaning a little in her sleep, with the 
right arm thrown clear of the body, as though it pro- 
tected something that was not there. 

It was after this night that life became a little easier 
for Holden. The ever-present pain of loss drove him 
into his work, and the work repaid him by filling up his 
mind for eight or nine hours a day. Ameera sat alone 
in the house and brooded, but grew happier when she 
understood that Holden was more at ease, according to 


84 WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 


the custom of women. They touched happiness again, 
but this time with caution. 

“It was because we loved Tota that he died. The 
jealousy of God was upon us/’ said Ameera. “I have 
hung up a large black jar before our window to turn 
the Evil Eye from us, and we must make no protesta- 
tions of delight, but go softly underneath the stars, lest 
God find us out. Is that not good talk, worthless one ?” 

She had shifted the accent of the word that means 
“beloved,” in proof the sincerity of her purpose. But 
the kiss that followed the new christening was a thing 
that any deity might have envied. They went about 
henceforth saying: “It is naught — it is naught,” and 
hoping that all the powers heard. 

The powers were busy on other things. They had 
allowed thirty million people four years of plenty, 
wherein men fed well and the crops were certain and 
the birth-rate rose year by year ; the districts reported 
a purely agricultural population varying from nine hun- 
dred to two thousand to the square mile of the over- 
burdened earth. It was time to make room. And the 
Member for Lower Tooting, wandering about In- 
dia in top-hat and frock-coat, talked largely of the 
benefits of British rule, and suggested as the one thing 
needful the establishment of a duly qualified electoral 
system and a general bestowal of the franchise. His 
long-suffering hosts smiled and made him welcome, and 
when he paused to admire, with pretty picked words, 
the blossom of the blood-red dhak-tree, that had 
flowered untimely for a sign of the sickness that was 
coming, they smiled more than ever. 

It was the Deputy Commissioner of Kot-Kumharsen, 
staying at the club for a day, who lightly told a tale 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 85 

that made Holden’s blood run cold as he overheard the 
end. 

“He won’t bother any one any more. Never saw a 
man so astonished in my life. By Jove ! I thought he 
meant to ask a question in the House about it. Fel- 
low-passenger in his ship — dined next him — bowled 
over by cholera, and died in eighteen hours. You 
needn’t laugh, you fellows. The Member for Lower 
Tooting is awfully angry about it; but he’s more 
scared. I think he’s going to take his enlightened self 
out of India.” 

“I’d give a good deal if he were knocked over. It 
might keep a few vestrymen of his kidney to their 
parish. But what’s this about cholera? It’s full early 
for anything of that kind,” said a warden of an un- 
profitable salt-lick. 

“Dunno,” said the deputy commissioner, reflectively. 
“We’ve got locusts with us. There’s sporadic cholera 
all along the north — at least, we’re calling it sporadic 
for decency’s sake. The spring crops are short in five 
districts, and nobody seems to know where the winter 
rains are. It’s nearly March now. I don’t want to 
scare anybody, but it seems to me that Nature’s going 
to audit her accounts with a big red pencil this sum- 
mer.” 

“Just when I wanted to take leave, too,” said a voice 
across the room. 

“There won’t be much leave this year, but there 
ought to be a great deal of promotion. I’ve come in to 
persuade the government to put my pet canal on the list 
of famine-relief works. It’s an ill wind that blows no 
fcooa. 1 shall get that canal finished at last.” 


86 WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 


“Is it the old programme, then,” said Holden — 
“famine, fever, and cholera?” 

“Oh, no! Only local scarcity and an unsual pre- 
valence of seasonal sickness. You’ll find it all in the 
reports if you live till next year. You’re a lucky chap. 
You haven’t got a wife to put you out of harm’s way. 
The hill-stations ought to be full of women this year.” 

“I think you’re inclined to exaggerate the talk in the 
bazaars,” said a young civilian in the secretariat. 
“Now, I have observed — ” 

“I dare say you have,” said the deputy commissioner, 
“but you’ve got a great deal more to observe, my son. 
In the meantime, I wish to observe to you” — And he 
drew him aside to discuss the construction of the canal 
that was so dear to his heart. 

Holden went to his bungalow, and began to under- 
stand that he was not alone in the world, and also that 
he was afraid for the sake of another, which is the 
most soul-satisfying fear known to man. 

Two months later, as the deputy had foretold, Na- 
ture began to audit her accounts with a red pencil. On 
the heels of the spring reapings came a cry for bread, 
and the government, which had decreed that no man 
should die of want, sent wheat. Then came the chol- 
era from all four quarters of the compass. It struck a 
pilgrim gathering of half a million at a sacred shrine. 
Many died at the feet of their god, the others broke 
and ran over the faceof the land, carrying the pestilence 
with them. It smote a walled city and killed two hun- 
dred a day. The people crowded the trains, hanging 
on to the footboards and squatting on the roofs of the 
carriages; and the cholera followed them, for at each 
station they dragged out the dead and the dying on 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 87 


the platforms reeking of lime-wash and carbolic acid. 
They died by the roadside, and the horses of the Eng- 
lishmen shied at the corpses in the grass. The rains 
did not come, and the earth turned to iron lest man 
should escape by hiding in her. The English sent their 
wives away to the Hills, and went about their work, 
coming forward as they were bidden to fill the gaps 
in the fighting line. Holden, sick with fear of losing 
his chiefest treasure on earth, had done his best to 
persuade Ameera to go away with her mother to the 
Himalayas. 

“Why should I go?” said she one evening on the 
roof. 

“There is sickness, and the people are dying, and all 
the white mem-log have gone.” 

“All of them?” 

“All — unless, perhaps, there remain some old scald- 
head who vexes her husband’s heart by running risk of 
death.” 

“Nay; who stays is my sister, and thou must not 
abuse her, for I will be a scald-head too. I am glad all 
the bold white mem-log are gone.” 

“Do I speak to a woman or a babe ? Go to the Hills, 
and I will see to it that thou goest like a queen’s daugh- 
ter. Think, child! In a red-lacquered bullock-cart, 
veiled and curtained, with brass peacocks upon the pole 
and red-cloth hangings. I will send two orderlies for 
guard, and” — 

“Peace ! Thou art the babe in speaking thus. What 
use are those toys to me? He would have patted the 
bullocks and played with the housings. For his sake, 
perhaps — thou hast made me very English — I might 
have gone. Now I will not. Let the mem-log run.” 


88 WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 


“Their husbands are sending them, beloved.” 

“Very good talk. Since when hast thou been my 
husband to tell me what to do ? I have but borne thee 
a son. Thou art only all the desire of my soul to me. 
How shall I depart when I know that if evil befall 
thee by the breadth of so much as my littlest finger-nail 
— is that not small? — I should be aware of it though I 
were in Paradise ? And here, this summer thou 
mayest die — ai, Janee, die! — and in dying they might 
call to tend thee a white woman, and she would rob me 
in the last of thy love.” 

“But love is not born in a moment, or on a death- 
bed.” 

“What dost thou know of love, stone-heart? She 
would take thy thanks at least, and, by God and the 
Prophet and Beebee Miriam, the mother of thy 
Prophet, that I will never endure. My lord and my 
love, let there be no more foolish talk of going away. 
Where thou art, I am. It is enough.” She put an 
arm round his neck and a hand on his mouth. 

There are not many happinesses so complete as those 
that are snatched under the shadow of the sword. 
They sat together and laughed, calling each other 
openly by every pet name that could move the wrath 
of the gods. The city below them was locked up in 
its own torments. Sulphur-fires blazed in the streets ; 
the conches in the Hindoo temples screamed and bel- 
lowed, for the gods were inattentive in those days. 
There was a service in the great Mohammedan shrine, 
and the call to prayer from the minarets was almost 
unceasing. They heard the wailing in the houses of the 
dead, and once the shriek of a mother who had lost 
a child and was calling for its return. In the grey 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 89 

dawn they saw the dead borne out through the city 
gates, each litter with his own little knot of mourners. 
Wherefore they kissed each other and shivered. 

It was a red and heavy audit, for the land was very 
sick and needed a little breathing-space ere the torrent 
of cheap life should flood it anew. The children of 
immature fathers and undeveloped mothers made no 
resistance. They were cowed and sat still, waiting till 
the sword should be sheathed in November, if it were 
so willed. There were gaps among the English, but 
the gaps were filled. The work of superintending 
famine relief, cholera-sheds, medicine distribution, and 
what little sanitation was possible, went forward be- 
cause it was so ordered. 

Holden had been told to hold himself in readiness to 
move to replace the next man who should fall. There 
were twelve hours in each day when he could not see 
Ameera, and she might die in three. He was consider- 
ing what his pain would be if he could not see her for 
three months, or if she died out of his sight. He was 
absolutely certain that her death would be demanded 
— so certain that, when he looked up from the tele- 
gram and saw Pir Khan breathless in the doorway, he 
laughed aloud, “And?” — said he. 

“When there is a cry in the night and the spirit flut- 
ters into the throat, who has a charm that will restore? 
Come swiftly, heaven born. It is the black cholera.” 

Holden galloped to his home. The sky was heavy 
with clouds, for the long-deferred rains were at hand, 
and the heat was stifling. Ameera’s mother met him 
in the court-yard, whimpering: “She is dying. She is 
nursing herself into death. She is all but dead. What 
shall I do, sahib?” 


90 WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 

Ameera was lying in the room in which Tota had 
been born. She made no sign when Holden entered, 
because the human soul is a very lonely thing, and 
when it is getting ready to go away hides itself in a 
misty border-land where the living may not follow. 
The black cholera does its work quietly and without 
explanation. Ameera was being thrust out of life as 
though the Angel of Death had himself put his hand 
upon her. The quick breathing seemed to show that 
she was either afraid or in pain, but neither eyes nor 
mouth gave any answer to Holden’s kisses. There 
was nothing to be said or done. Holden could only 
wait and suffer. The first drops of the rain began to 
fall on the roof, and he could hear shouts of joy in the 
parched city. 

The soul came back a little and the lips moved. 
Holden bent down to listen. “Keep nothing of mine,” 
said Ameera. “Take no hair from my head. She 
would make thee burn it later on. That flame I should 
feel. Lower! Stoop lower! Remember only that I 
was thine and bore thee a son. Though thou wed a 
white woman to-morrow, the pleasure of taking in thy 
arms thy first son is taken from thee forever. Re- 
member me when thy son is born — the one that shall 
carry thy name before all men. His misfortunes be 
on my head. I bear witness — I bear witness” — the 
lips were forming the words on his ear — “that there 
is no God but — thee, beloved.” 

Then she died. Holden sat still, and thought of any 
kind was taken from him till he heard Ameera’s 
mother lift the curtain. 

“Is she dead, sahib?” 

“She is dead.” 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 91 


“Then I will mourn, and afterward take an inven- 
tory of the furniture in this house; for that will be 
mine. The sahib does not mean to resume it. It is so 
little, so very little, sahib, and I am an old woman. I 
would like to lie softly/’ 

“For the mercy of God, be silent awhile! Go out 
and mourn where I cannot hear.” 

“Sahib, she will be buried in four hours.” 

“I know the custom. I shall go ere she is taken 
away. The matter is in thy hands. Look to it that 
the bed — on which — on which — she lies” — 

“Aha! That beautiful red-lacquered bed. I have 
long desired” — 

— “That the bed is left here untouched for my dis- 
posal. All else in the house is thine. Hire a cart, 
take everything, go hence, and before sunrise let there 
be nothing in this house but that which I have ordered 
thee to respect.” 

“I am an old woman. I would stay at least for the 
days of mourning, and the rains have just broken. 
Whither shall I go?” 

“What is that to me? My order is that there is a 
going. The house-gear is worth a thousand rupees, 
and my orderly will bring thee a hundred rupees to- 
night.” 

“That is very little. Think of the cart-hire.” 

“It shall be nothing unless thou goest, and with 
speed. Oh, woman, get hence, and leave me to my 
dead!” 

The mother shuffled down the staircase, and in her 
anxiety to take stock of the house-fittings forgot to 
mourn. Holden stayed by Ameera’s side, and the rain 
roared on the roof. He could not think connectedly 


92 WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 


by reason of the noise, though he made many attempts 
to do so. Then four sheeted ghosts glided dripping 
into the room and stared at him through their veils. 
They were the washers of the dead. Holden left the 
room and went out to his horse. He had come in a 
dead, stifling calm, through ankle-deep dust. He 
found the court-yard a rain-lashed pond alive with 
frogs, a torrent of yellow water ran under the gate, 
and a roaring wind drove the bolts of the rain like 
buckshot against the mud walls. Pir Khan was shiver- 
ing in his little hut by the gate, and the horse was 
stamping uneasily in the water. 

“I have been told the sahib’s order,” said he. “It 
is well. This house is now desolate. I go also, for my 
monkey face would be a reminder of that which has 
been. Concerning the bed, I will bring that to thy 
house yonder in the morning. But remember, sahib, 
it will be to thee as a knife turned in a green wound. 
I go upon a pilgrimage and I will take no money. I 
have grown fat in the protection of the Presence, 
whose sorrow is my sorrow. For the last time I hold 
his stirrup.” 

He touched Holden’s foot with both hands, and the 
horse sprang out into the road, where the creaking 
bamboos were whipping the sky and all the frogs were 
chuckling. Holden could not see for the rain in his 
face. He put his hands before his eyes and muttered : 
“Oh, you brute! You utter brute!” 

The news of his trouble was already in his bunga- 
low. He read the knowledge in his butler’s eyes when 
Ahmed Khan brought in food, and for the first and 
last time in his life laid a hand upon his master’s shoul- 
der, saying: “Eat, sahib, eat. Meat is good against 


WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 93 

sorrow. I also have known. Moreover, the shadows 
come and go, sahib. The shadows come and go. These 
be curried eggs.” 

Holden could neither eat nor sleep. The heavens 
sent down eight inches of rain in that night and scoured 
the earth clean. The waters tore down walls, broke 
roads, and washed open the shallow graves in the 
Mohammedan burying-ground. All next day it rained, 
and Holden sat still in his house considering his sor- 
row. On the morning of the third day he received a 
telegram which said only: “Ricketts, Myndonie. Dy- 
ing. Holden. Relieve. Immediate.” Then he 
thought that before he departed he would look at the 
house wherein he had been master and lord. There 
was a break in the weather. The rank earth steamed 
with vapor, and Holden was vermilion from head to 
heel with the prickly-heat born of sultry moisture. 

He found that the rains had torn down the mud- 
pillars of the gateway, and the heavy wooden gate that 
had guarded his life hung drunkenly from one hinge. 
There was grass three inches high in the court-yard; 
Pir Khan’s lodge was empty, and the sodden thatch 
sagged between the beams. A grey squirrel was in 
possession of the veranda, as if the house had been un- 
tenanted for thirty years instead of three days. 
Ameera’s mother had removed everything except some 
mildewed matting. The tick-tick of the little scorpions 
as they hurried across the floor was the only sound in 
the house. Ameera’s room and that other one where 
Tota had lived were heavy with mildew, and the nar- 
row staircase leading to the roof was streaked and 
stained with rain-borne mud. Holden saw all these 
things, and came out again to meet in the road Durga 


94 WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY 

Dass, his landlord — portly, affable, clothed in white 
muslin, and driving a C-spring buggy. He was over- 
looking his property, to see how the roofs withstood 
the stress of the first rains. 

“I have heard,” said he, “you will not take this place 
any more, sahib?” 

“What are you going to do with it ?” 

“Perhaps I shall let it again.” 

“Then I will keep it on while I am away.” 

Durga Dass was silent for some time. “You shall 
not take it on, sahib,” he said. “When I was a young 
man I also — But to-day I am a member of the muni- 
cipality. Ho! ho! No. When the birds have gone, 
what need to keep the nest? I will have it pulled 
down; the timber will sell for something always. It 
shall be pulled down, and the municipality shall make a 
road across, as they desire, from the burning-ghat to 
the city wall. So that no man may say where this 
house stood.” 





































t 







* 



i 


i 














































I l j I I \ 










% 










• A 



























*!• 

















* 




































